Something Gold
by H.T.Marie
Summary: Dean goes to Hell. Sam goes to Hell. Hell collapses around them, but they climb out of the Pit to an empty world, only themselves to rely on. They make do until Dean stops breathing on the floor of a motel room in East Texas. Wincest. Complete.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: **This is an old story, written at the end of Season 3 when we were all still wondering how Dean's deal would play out and posted late that summer when we were all biting our nails, fanfiction cups overflowing with anticipation and speculation. There's a reason why I'm posting it here now, but I'm not going to weigh down the front end with all that baggage. That's at the end if you ever get there. At the time it was posted, I had several betas, and I don't know if any still frequent this site, so Mandy, Laura, Karen, and Jen, if you see this, consider yourselves thanked again a thousand fold. Pay close attention to the warnings.

**Warnings: THIS IS WINCEST. There's a reason it was posted on Livejournal and not here. That is it. Don't like, don't read. However, there is no graphic sex. That's in the deleted scene I refer to later. Other than that, there's the usual warning for language, present tense, and believe it or not there was an Alpaca mentioned even back in 2008. Who knew it would ever make an appearance on the show?**

**Summary: ** Dean went to Hell. Sam went to Hell. Hell couldn't hold them both, but crawling out of the Pit finds them in a new world where they seem to be the only two people left. They get by the best they can until Dean stops breathing, sprawled on a motel floor in East Texas.

**Something Gold**__

In the beginning of the new world, the first dawn in over four years, Dean says, "Let there be light," but not in so many words. And there is. Light. And it's good. But it's not pretty. Not in the least.

The valley, once called Denver, stretches out before them, gray and desolate. The Mile High City, substantially lower, Mecca for all the pale and forgotten still strong enough to reach for the sky. The crater in the middle where everything wicked disappeared along with everything good in the final days of the war and the world as they knew it, bubbles with ubiquitous green slime. Fresh water trickles out the walls of rock, the only source deep beneath the surface and down into collecting pools.

After all these years of summer, and the constant roil of lightning overhead, the rock face stays hot, and half the water is steam before it makes the ground. Dean's sunlight bounces through the vapor, and Sam can tell from the blush on Dean's cheeks that he sees the spectrum just as clearly as everyone else.

Dean Winchester, proprietor of rainbows.

XXX

The car's covered in soot and ash, except where Sam's hands brushed it off in his search for provisions. He imagines there was more of the gray powder before the rains started, yet there's no char anywhere. Not as far as he can tell. Nothing's burnt so much as melted, yellowed and slimy with decay. He wonders if demons bleed soot. A little of the grill's clean where the rain blew in, but the Impala's got no glint in her teeth, rust already gapping the radiator screen and one headlight socket.

Dean's...? Fazed. He didn't do more than shrug when Sam led him to the edge of the crater they climbed out of and waved out over the crevasse that used to be Lawrence. No desperate dive in after anyone and everything that needed saving. They both know no one's there. He didn't make one smartass remark when they stopped at the puddle of slime and filled up their empty water jug with the sludge, wary glances toward the sky. This is the way things are, now, another pothole in the road. Nothing they can't handle.

Hell and back is a long way to go, more than enough rough road to round off the edges of whatever gnawing angst has been rolling around inside them since Sam was a baby. But the car, the gaps in her smile, inch of ash on her paint? Well that gets Dean going.

He doesn't say it, not at first, but Sam can tell in the way he stands up straighter. The scabbed over burns on his knuckles work free of his pockets. It's the same look he used to get when they'd follow a lead for weeks only to track it down the day after some poor kid died. There's nothing in the world innocent anymore, nothing living, anyway. And now, nothing inanimate either.

Dean clears his throat once, chin ducked against his shoulder, like he's planning to apologize. Instead, he hums, sounds like AC/DC, maybe Aerosmith, Sam can't tell since half of it's lost in the sticky air. He opens the trunk, grimacing at the way it groans, jerks in his haste as buckets and rags, cans of Rust-o-leum and Armor All clank to the ground. There's no water, except what they brought to drink, so Dean starts wiping with an old motel towel, great swipes across the roof that change direction so rapidly the towel snaps and ash flips into the air in billowing clouds.

Sam thinks the humming has changed to singing when snatches and phrases cut through the murk. Then he hears. "Never would've given it to me... promised... take care of her..."

When one arm doesn't work fast enough, Dean starts to clear off the windshield with one coat sleeve, the way he would if it was just a fresh dusting of snow between himself and the morning coffee run. Sam lets him be, feels like an outsider for the first time since they put their heads together and decided they were done playing defense, intent on storming the castle.

Behind them, the ruin of Lawrence steams in a sinkhole beneath a black sky that stretches into a horizon full of holes.

That, Dean mourned with a shrug, just the tug of his jacket closer over his shoulders. None of it was ever his anyway.

This, he fights for, not because it will change anything, but because he doesn't know how not to fight, not when it's family.

The movement is almost hypnotic, right arm, left arm, towel flick, and hum. Sam settles into watching, suddenly aware of the complete lack of distraction anywhere else, lack of pull in any other direction. He likes it. The world revolving around them. It's about damned time.

Of course, they've paid dearly for the privilege.

Sam can tell the exact moment the glass is cleared enough for Dean to see himself. The new Dean.

He barely remembers the demon that gave Dean the scar over his left eye. On the occasions when he can't not remember, and the face claws its way to the front of the glass over his mind's eye, Sam calls it Jack.

_"You don't know jack about what's coming, human." _

Occasions like now, when its calling card is glaring, red and raised off Dean's forehead, highlighted by the sheen of sweat spreading over it.

_"Don't know Jack, huh? Should I? Are you Jack? Because, from where I'm standing, you're all Jill...baby. I mean, look at that manicure. Whattaya call that nail polish? Goth-witch chic?"_

Maybe it was the "baby" that set the bastard off. They hadn't been in Hell long enough to learn the proper demon meet-and-greet etiquette, and apparently a game of "lemme twist your words around 'til I find you amusing" was considered impolite. Go figure. Dean always did have a way of putting his foot in it, smiling while he tracked it across the carpet when he could've just scraped it on the curb and been done with it.

How were they supposed to know Jack had a long tail snaked around behind them, another hand with more girly fingernails quivering on the end?

_"Ooh, they told me you'd be funny. I do so love a clever wit. I have to say, I'm a little disappointed. Went right for the pansy-assed girl jokes. I was hoping for some originality." A sigh. "But if we must go with cliché, then tee-hee, hear me giggle." A roll of his eyes. "You know what would really put a blush on these black cheeks?"  
><em>  
>Most likely, it was the snarky eyebrow waggle he got in reply that pissed old Jack off. A second later the eyebrow was gone, peeled up to Dean's scalp along with half of Dean's forehead, and what was left was drenched red over pasty white, all over the ground and Sam.<p>

_"A nice face lift. Preferably yours. That girly enough for you, hunter?"_

Jack really shouldn't have laughed at Dean. Only Sam's allowed to do that. It's in the handbook, _Big Brother Worship for Dummies._

Along with that bloody piece of Dean, something ripped out of Sam, too, something he'd grown increasingly weary of carrying like a Kevlar vest turned inside out. It wasn't something he carried to protect himself.

His memory's kind of wonky beyond that, flashes of black and blood against a glare he can't see beyond. Screams. And the ground pitching beneath him. Everything's surreal. Somewhere between the pastels of Mother Goose and the dark shadows of Grimm.

Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Hell came tumbling after.

Forever's passed since Dean's last seen himself. A second can be forever, depending on what happens within it. That scar is evolution, devolution, creation, and annihilation. Forever.

Turns out, of all the deadly sins, vanity is the hardest to cure. Whatever's humming in Dean's throat chokes off. His hand misses a beat, slides off the glass, and whooshes against the hem of his jacket.

It's healed well, considering how little care they afforded it with Hell imploding around them. The eyebrow's back in place, just cross-hatched by raised scar tissue on each end. Sam has stopped seeing the "blemish," forgotten already that it hasn't always been there. Dean doesn't have the same benefit. It's probably good Dean hasn't seen it until now. He'd have asked how it's healed so quickly, and that's a question Sam's not ready to consider. One of many.

As it is, Dean sees it, and his face, the old and the new, falters along with his arm on the roof. It's a stutter like the manual turn of a crankshaft on an ancient engine, a quick hiccup that still needs more umph to turn over. It's enough to move Sam. He could pretend he doesn't see and go to the other side, start clearing another spot, but he doesn't. He goes instead to the same side Dean's been wiping and reaches across him so they bump shoulders. _I'm here, dumbass. _

Dean blinks with a jerk, a little like a steer jabbed with a hot shot, then goes back to work. His fingers ghost over Sam's belt on their way back up to the windshield, pause there a little longer than it takes to maneuver their shoulders out of each other's way.

For that second, everything falls out of focus except those fingers, and they're back on some ledge halfway between Hell and wherever this is, clinging to the only thing they still believe in.

XXX

_It takes them days to climb out of the rubble. Of course there's rubble. The implosion of Hell and the "dissolution" of every evil son of a bitch on either side of its gates were bound to result in some collateral damage. There's a hole in the fabric of reality, a physical one, but then what's reality except what we make it? If physical means touchable, then it's real, so says the jagged cuts in their hands, burning strain in their muscles, pound of blood in their ears. Clinging to the great wall that is Hell's last guard tower, there's only pain and down, down, down, up, up, up. Just two choices, but they can choose, which is more freedom than they had before it all broke loose. This time they choose up, the only reminder they have that they are still human._

So they climb. For days. Silent days broken only by grunts and outstretched hands, rub of split knuckles against bloody fingertips, fingernails long since ripped from their beds. Ominous plinkplinkplink plunk...plunk...plunk of rocks bouncing toward them then over, and down, down, down. They're not sure they've ever heard one hit bottom, and neither one's willing to venture whether that's because they're too far away to hear or because there is no bottom. Sam suspects there may be just a hole in the world that goes in halfway and then heads out without changing direction. When the static misery breaches the fringes of delusion, he wonders: is it even possible to fall through a hole in the world; at what point does down become up, and is it possible to make a sudden splat in the middle? A Stanford education, for Christ's sake, and this is what he uses it to think about.

In. Out. Up. Down. Days and days of not knowing which. Sweat with the tang of blood and creosote crusted over parched lips.

They have no choice but to drink the water seeping through the cracks in the hardpan beneath their fingers. No idea where it comes from or what's washed in with it, but positive they'll die of thirst if they don't drink something. So, they drink. Sometimes while clinging precariously to the rock face, tongues scraping bloody from teasing the stubborn drops out of cracks they can't see in the dark. Sometimes Sam finds a nook and gets a hand free, so Dean can sip from his palm, every muscle trembling with exhaustion. Sometimes, it's the other way around. Sometimes they drink huddled together on crumbling ledges they're not sure will hold them, each with one hand wedged into a crevice, and the other in his brother's belt, cheeks pressed against the wall and mouths open like helpless nestlings. If the ledge falls, they'll go together, maybe one arm short, or they'll stay together, anchored by one or the other's bloody fingers.

That kind of devotion, determination, and grit doesn't rationalize, doesn't compartmentalize where it's appropriate. It starts in their chests, moves up into their throats and down into their guts, lower into soft places that harden and slick with life and need. And they're pressed together in spaces barely big enough for one, just the ache and each other. Alive.

XXX

They haven't really been apart since then, not while both were conscious. They've got the whole world to stretch their limbs, and yet, they're too close together to be separate, and too far away to be whole, aching in the wake of blood that pumps fast enough to create a vacuum. It only takes a moment for Dean's hand to brush past, go back to clearing the ash from the car. It's the longest second of Sam's life, and not long enough. He swallows it down and tries not to notice the way Dean's chin trembles beneath parted lips.

Dean gives a half-hearted sweep at the last of the soot over the driver's side, then pushes away with a chuckle. "It's just a little rust..."

"Not the end of the world," Sam finishes, his face twisting out of his control, a war between relief and irony.

Dean bumps back with his shoulder, hard enough to push Sam behind him a step, his smile no less effective for the new lines over his forehead. "Bitch." _No, it's really not._

"Jerk."_Damn straight._

They've sure come a long way to end back at the beginning.

XXX

_They climb for so long, they wonder if maybe rubble is all there is. Maybe every gate collapsed at once, and the holes they made swallowed the ground between. Maybe they are all there is. Maybe, but even if they are, neither will see the other live and let that be failure. Even if Dean's too macho to say, Sam's not too naive to know he's always been Dean's world, anyway. So, they climb, not for themselves, but for each other. So neither is alone._

Eventually, something changes. The water's tangier and seems to run down the rock face toward them rather than seeping through. Sometimes they can't drink it. Sometimes the tiniest sip burns the way bath bubbles tingle when they go up noses and down the backs of throats instead of over tongues- "down the wrong pipe," as Dad used to say, smacking them on their backs until the coughing stopped. They climb a little slower, dragged down by the weight of worry at what they'll find-worry about where they might be heading, where the water running off is less pure than the water they sucked out of rocks that used to be the walls of Hell.

They don't really think about it much, can't form thoughts between the screaming in their heads. They're not okay.

The thirst gets less urgent about the same time their thoughts start to swim, but neither sees the clever irony in that. Who needs to drink when the air's so thick with steam that the climb resembles a slow rise up from a free dive to the bottom of the ocean and each breath sloshes around in their lungs?

They're closer to something different, if not better, and still there's no light overhead.

When they finally find a ledge both big enough to sprawl on and sturdy enough not to quake beneath them, they drag themselves onto it and sleep. It's not until they awaken to rain pelting in their faces that they realize they've made it to the surface, that the flat rock beneath them is the door on the Gate to Hell, its mystical key embedded in the earth below it. When their skin turns slippery and tingles, they take shelter in a crypt, thankful this gate opened in Lawrence, where the dead were slightly more extravagant with their trappings than they'd been in Cold Oak. They push the bones into one corner and sprawl together in the other to wait for the rain to stop.

XXX

For the first five hundred miles, they leave the radio on, search up and down the dial. There's never anything but static, not even EVP. When Sam's arm gets tired of reaching, he slides more to the middle. Dean doesn't move his leg when their thighs butt against each other. Sam doesn't think twice about sliding his foot down off the hump in the middle so his knee bumps Dean's, toe drags behind his calf before thudding onto the floor board. The value of personal space seems to have evaporated along with the rest of the human race.

Sam doesn't even need his Stanford education to recognize the scabbed over burns on Dean's face and hands, the smell like pickled eggs clinging in their clothes.

Acid rain.

It rains every day, or every night, hard to tell with no sun. The absence of thunder is almost more unsettling than the stark red and blue flashes on the belly of the sky. All above is not as it should be, and they've yet to see enough of what's below to know what they've dragged themselves into. But it doesn't bode well when retreating lightning is the only way to pin down daybreak.

The road's in good shape, but their maps are mostly useless. Every exit leads to just another stretch of the same nowhere. A gas station, a truck stop, convenience store, a ways beyond that, suburbia in all its glory, like the photo negative of human existence, black and white, and faded. There're cars in the garages but none on the street, no smoke from the chimneys, no factories in the back. Everything that would be significant, towering skylines, monuments, all gone. Topeka, Witchita Falls, Oklahoma City, just weeping, scabby craters like they were nothing but pox. Five hundred miles of scars and not one single drop of pumping blood.

After the first hour, they don't speak, too busy looking, listening, wondering. A part of Sam sloshes inside his skin like a wave breaking over something miles below the surface. Turbulence he can't name, not guilt, not rage, not grief. There should be something to mourn, something to salt or burn, something dead to move upwind of. But there isn't. No bodies. No abandoned cars on the road. No Emergency Broadcast System to tell them they're about to get caught in the rain. But for the squelch of static over the speakers, occasional feedback whine from a bad connection in the dash, the silence is comfortable. It shouldn't be. It just is. They've lost some momentum, but the drive is still there, and the road's an old, old friend.

The first time they stop for gas, it takes an hour to figure out how to pump it out of the underground tank with no electricity, a feat that's not quite on par with building an EMF detector from a Walkman but most likely a bogey for anyone not Dean. It's not easy. Nothing is. But there's food inside the store for their trouble. Little Debbie and Hostess, bottled water and piss warm beer, everything a growing boy needs. They take all the Slim Jims and beef jerky they can carry, potato chips in single serving bags so they won't get stale, and bean dip, because their daddy taught them meat and potatoes should always come with a vegetable.

They empty all the money out of their pockets onto the counter to make room for a few more Ho Ho's, and go back to driving, the silence broken by crackling cellophane and the slobbery noise Dean makes chewing beef jerky with his mouth open. They're way more comfortable than they ought to be traversing an alien landscape.

XXX

_They drag themselves out of the crypt when the lightning streaks low on the horizon, moving gradually away in silent ripples. The lightning's cyclical, brightest in what seems like twelve-hour intervals. Meteorology was never really Sam's thing, but the sun must still rise and set. Lightning's just the tail end of the reaction, all they can see this side of that perpetual black cloud bank and the thick air always threatening more skin-melting rain. If it really is twelve hours, (his watch didn't make it up the embankment, not his shoes or the sock on his right foot either), then the days haven't shortened or lengthened much in the time since they stopped tracking it. They can't have been gone that long in the grand scope of things._

Still, this place, red lightning over black skies, everything dulled like old newsprint, smudged under the greasy thumb of judgment or fate…They've never been here. It can't be home. That's fine, though. They have no intention of staying.

XXX

Restlessness claws at the backs of their necks to keep them moving, won't let them go to ground knowing full well the only ground they have is each other. Not ready for what that means.

So, they drive, no what or why to solve, just a giant sea of where. Even that's a question they can't really answer, not with the skyline full of holes where cities used to be. No time's wasting, nothing's building except the charge in the clouds overhead. They fall into a rhythm not unlike the thunk-a-thunk-a-thunk of the Impala's tires over the broken highway. Nowhere to go. Just being, everywhere they can, places with no names.

The cities are gone, all of them as far as they can tell, but the small towns, the suburbs, all the unincorporated little mars on the landscape still stand. Empty.

They get out at what used to be Dallas, just to survey the damage. It's gone. No rubble, no gaping abyss, just a crater oozing slime and tainted water, like evil was a giant tentacled beast with cities in its suckers that evaporated along with it.

They know Hell was another realm altogether, not some underground dungeon, but it had roots in the world, and they ran deep. There's a lot of nothing where it used to be. This is their inheritance, what they get for still living.

When the first streaks of lightning spark on the horizon, they talk. Like the sky's not the only thing split open. They grab a six-pack of long necks out of the backseat and sit on the edge of the crater, just the width of the beer carton between them, ankles bumping together against the wall.

"Y'know," says Sam, "there is some mythology that says the righteous will be lifted bodily into Heaven at the end of days." He's not exactly sure what he's suggesting, just thinking out loud, a hint of an idea that's been pulling the short hairs at the base of his neck all day.

"The rapture?" Dean laughs, slow and ironic around his bottle, then takes a long drink before settling it between his legs. "Do I look like Kirk Cameron to you? I mean, c'mon. Why bother lifting everyone bodily into Heaven except the two dudes who were already in Hell? Seems like, if someone wanted to leave us behind, all they had to do was keep us in Hell and let the rest of the world go on its merry way. Though, how any world could be merry without my wit and charm to brighten it, is beyond me." He waggles his eyebrows with only half the oomph it requires to be convincing, the rest swallowed either in thought or disappointment. It'd be just like Dean to be disappointed, more ready to die for a cause than to live without one.

Sam laughs, rolling his lower lip behind his teeth with his tongue. "Yeah, I guess. But, who's to say we're the ones left behind and not...?" He stops himself mid-sentence and shakes his head. "Never mind."

"Sammmmyyyy." Dean raises his beer back up to his lips but pauses to speak before taking a swallow. "You're not actually thinking this is Heaven? You? Mr. Picket Fences himself?"

"What? I saw some picket fences back there."

Dean shrugs, head cocked in concession. "Maybe. But there's one flaw in that theory."

"What? Besides the fact that you obviously rode in on my coattails."

Leaning in as his eyebrows leer toward the horizon. "No virgins," Dean says.

Sam laughs around the mouth of his beer bottle. "Suure."

"No, seriously. I mean, if the virgins are all somewhere else, then they're pretty damned frustrated without me to help them, you know, shed some of that virtue." A wistful sigh. "Plump, juicy, trembling...ow!" He coughs around an elbow to the ribs. "...virtue. And if this is Heaven, well, lemme say there's a distinct lack of virgins. I'm calling bullshit on the whole paradise thing. False advertising, in my opinion."

"Dean, I think the end of the world is probably a good time to start using your upstairs brain."

"No, I'm serious here, Sammy boy. Nothing impairing my judgment but the beer, and unlike you, I can hold my liquor. The way I see it, your whole rapture theory? Kinda hinges on the missing virgins. Find me a blushing virgin, and I'll tell you where we are."

Drinking from his own beer, Sam swallows wrong, chokes just enough to bring heat to his cheeks. He catches Dean watching him out of the corner of his eye, a hint of snark forming in his one good eyebrow. Sam knows that look. "Dude, I'm not blushing."

" 'Course you're not."

"Dean! I was not blushing."

"Never said you were. I'm sure it's just sunburn." Eyebrows raised to the black sky above.

"I...I don't blush and...I just choked, AND I am NOT a virgin."

Dean seems to find the lip of his beer bottle highly amusing. "Choked, eh? Sounds like a virgin problem to me."

"And how is choking a virgin prob..." He almost chokes again and jabs a knuckle into Dean's shoulder. The dick. "I'm not GAY either." Not technically. Bi-curious probably counts, but Dean doesn't know about that. And face to face with the only man left in existence is probably not the best situation in which to mention he just might swing that way.

Dean manages to stop his sideways topple with his opposite elbow against the ground, ends up sprawled lewdly without even spilling his beer. "Well, then you're at least half virgin."

"Dean!"

"And we're both at least half frustrated, so my bet's on this being Hell."

Sam can't help but laugh. "We destroyed Hell, remember? Where's the fire and brimstone?"

Dean shrugs and drags himself to standing but stays bent enough to chuckle in Sam's ear. "I dunno. Must be a special Hell." Something falls out of his pocket and hits the ground with a rustle of cellophane. He snatches it up, drops it in Sam's lap. "Here, have my Ding Dong. Just be careful you don't choke on it."

XXX

The urgency bleeds out of them in bursts of static over the airwaves, unanswered questions for which they're willing to accept the answer, 'just because.' They stop crossing the city limits and checking their speed by habit like some hick cop's gonna give them a ticket or run them out of town. Stop opening closets half-expecting to find someone huddled inside. They don't find friends or enemies, no war or peace, but plenty of everything they need and even more they've always wanted-little houses and picket fences, yards full of tricycles and baseball bats. To the victors... spoilage. They leave it all behind just to keep driving. Shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, and thigh to thigh.

The future's not planned, but there's still enough past to haunt them. Haunts their bones and their blood. And it's a haunting they can't solve with a can of lighter fluid and a match, something locked in Dean's chest they can't exorcise.

XXX

They're in Wisconsin, in a little campground they'd stayed in a few times with Dad. It's their third silent night there. With Dean fighting a cold, there's no reason to keep going. The place is supposed to be familiar, comfortable, but nothing is. That long ago whippoorwill floating overhead in the leafless trees is just a memory, but they suspect there must be red blood pumping somewhere to support the booming mosquito population in the Fox River bottom. Red blood and fresh water. If there's life left to be found anywhere, they should find it here.

It finds them, instead. Proof of life and death.

Dean coughs and taps his stick on the rocks with one hand while the other covers his mouth.  
>Sam doesn't wonder where Dean caught a cold. Not out loud.<p>

Dean coughs again, high and tight in his throat. "E.T." he croaks, holding up his stick like one long, glowing finger, "phone...hommmme."

Sam's about to put on his best 'I am not amused' face, complete with eyeroll and forehead crease, when Dean wheezes, a little hitch on the end of it that says whatever's trying to break loose still hasn't. "Next off-ramp we hit we need to find a town with a drug store, grab something for that cough."

Dean shrugs. "Yeah, maybe." No argument about wasting time or money. "Should probably refill our first aid kit, too."

"Yeah." Nothing to add, just a nod.

She comes out of the brush near the cabin they're holed up in, just the other side of the clearing where they've started a fire to cook, since the propane tank is empty. A doe, white-tailed with big patches of bare hide over her shoulders where the hair's fallen out or been rubbed off. She looks full grown but totters into the clearing with all the strength and coordination of Bambi on the frozen lake, a quiver in her belly, breath panting through her flaking nose. She's sick, near dead, and delirious. Any prey animal with its senses would steer clear of the campfire even without the added warning of Spam sizzling in a cast iron skillet.

She staggers too close to the fire to be seeing, let alone feeling the heat searing the ends of her dull coat.

Dean handles it without a word. The killing. Like it still means something to be a hunter. It would be inhumane not to. Sam doesn't mention she might be the last of her species, because it doesn't matter.

It's been so long since they've had need to shoot anything, they both jump when he pulls the trigger. The report cracks against the back of Sam's skull, and he closes his eyes against it the way he did he first time he ever fired a gun himself, remembers the Pepsi can that only fell over because of the breeze, anything to forget those big, glazed eyes.

Sam's never heard a sound quite like the one she makes when her jaw falls open, tongue lolling out. The last wheeze of a bagpipe trampled on a battlefield.

Her belly's full. Full of sprouts with almost no color in them, still-green pulp from tree branches, and a mucousy algae that only grows under water on the bottoms of rocks. Lower, her womb's blackened and filled with pus, at its heart, a mummified fetus that couldn't live on sprouts and algae. They both know when they see it her meat won't be any good to eat, but they burn it. The world is full of waste, leftover prosperity and greed. There's so little life, they can't leave her to rot.

The rancid smell clings in their clothes and hair, thick and greasy, coating their sinuses so every breath is foul and lingering. No fat drips down to stoke the fire. They stir it up themselves, toss in whatever wood they can find that's not too wet until she crumbles to ash. They don't have to watch, yet they can't look away, silent homage to what's gone and might never be again. When the wind shifts and the smoke curls around Dean like phantom fingers, he doesn't move away.

When their sticks stay over the coals too long, they flare up and glow bright red. They were light sabers once, years ago when Sam and Dean were just kids and they only played at being heroes. No cowboys and Indians for them. Enough guns and knives in their real life not to be fun in play, but they could be Jedi, could put down the light sabers when they got tired. The memory tickles at the back of Sam's brain, bait wiggling in murky water that can't seem to draw a bite.

_Hiss, whoosh. _

There was something magical in the way the sparks had showered off those glowing sticks when they clashed them together, something lingering in how they'd floated on the breeze. Something Sam can't forget, and it's tied up in something else he feels like he'd rather not remember. Their past seems false here with the canvas so drastically changed. Pictures of the ocean on a backdrop of fire. There are days Sam thinks none of that ever happened, and it's always just been this, just DeanandSam and the road. He spends surprisingly little effort trying to prove that wrong.

Still, this ghost is set on rising, paints messages on the fogged up mirror inside his head.

_Hiss, whoosh..."Luke, I am your father." Hiss, whoosh... _

When the first sprinkle of rain hisses in the fire, they tap the embers out on the rocks and duck inside, the unfinished memory still wheezing its way up some long mountain trail in his mind.

XXX

Sam wakes in the night to a drip-drip-drip on his pillow. Not so much awakens as surfaces. A dream lingers, bits of dialogue, the clack-bang of glowing fire sticks clashing together, hiss-whoosh, hiss-whoosh. The video and audio tracks of two separate movies war inside his head. He burrows deeper into the musty bedclothes and tries to ignore it, the pelting on the roof hypnotic enough to lull him under.

_Hiss-whoosh... "Luke..."_

Hiss-whoosh... "C'mon you guys have to have at least one puff. Just one. So we know you won't tell our parents."

"All right," hiss-whoosh, "but just me, not Sam."

"Dean..."

"It's all right." Hiss-whoosh..."He won't tell on me."

Sam doesn't know how much longer it is before the drip-drip-drip becomes a trickle and the hem of the sheet's damp and cold. He jerks like a marionette, killed in the show, but rising up to take a bow at the end. He sits straight up and flings the covers off one side of the bed, his feet over the other. He's torn off his first two long-sleeved shirts (acid burns itch like a bitch, best to take precautions) and dropped them on the floor before he can be certain the third is still dry.

He starts to take the last one off, for good measure, claws at the hem for a few desperate seconds, but the threat's passed, and the dark is heavy over his shoulders. Damp air hits the flesh over his stomach and elicits a bone-weary twinge deep in his muscles, making him want nothing more than to curl back in on himself and fall straight to his bed and whatever dream may come.

Of course, his bed's an acid bath. No sleeping there tonight.

_Hiss-whoosh... _

The dream's already flooding him, pooling in his feet so they're heavy as he trudges across the room and falls in beside his brother. Dean doesn't even grumble. _Hiss-whoosh... _They've shared closer spaces than this. It's just shoulder bump and slide over, down in the sheets and back to back between yawning breaths, barely parted eyelashes. _Hiss-whoosh... _Dean coughs and shakes the bed just enough to keep Sam from falling right back to sleep. Great. Floods _and_earthquakes. It really is the end of the world.

Another coughing fit follows, building on the first. Should've just slept on the floor and not disturbed his brother. Hand pressed over his eye sockets, Sam whispers, "You need a glass of water?"

_"Get him some water!"_

"I'm trying! He can't drink it."

"Why won't he stop coughing?"

"You made him smoke the cigarette."

"I didn't make him do anything."

"Hey! Sam, wait! You can't go out there. They'll smell it on you."

"I don't care. He can't breathe. Dean. Dean, I'm going to get Dad, okay?"

His own whisper cracks against his skull like Dean's .45, eyes pop open under the callous of his hand. Shit! Shitshitshitshit!

Hiss, whoosh...He's wide awake, propped on one elbow a second later and shakes Dean's shoulder. "Dean. Dean, do you still have your inhaler?"

Hiss... Dean actually stops breathing, hesitates like Wile E. Coyote on the edge of the cliff he's just stepped off. Then, whoosh, and a high, whining cough. "I don't need it anymore."

"You have asthma."

"I outgrew it. Doctor said I probably would. Haven't had an attack in at least ten years."

"No one really outgrows it. And you've been wheezing and coughing for days."

Hiss-whoosh, hiss-whoosh, hiss-whoosh... "I have a cold."

"Oh yeah? Who did you catch it from, Dean? And how come I'm not catching it?"

Hiss, whoosh-hiss, whoosh...cough. "Cuz you're a freak. Now go to sleep before I kick your ass out."

Dean makes an obvious effort to suppress the wheezing cough, turns over enough to hide his face in his pillow.

"I'm sorry," Sam says. "I forgot." He says it aloud, though maybe he meant not to.

Dean pretends to sleep, and Sam lets him pretend. They may have the world at their fingertips, but it's stale, moldy, and empty. All of it that matters is facing into the wall, choking on the decay.

He spends the rest of the night listening to the whine in Dean's chest, for that hitch that says it's about to stop, one hand on the bedpost and the other fisted in the bedsheet, irrational desperation pinned against the mattress. He keeps a pinky finger stretched against Dean's last rib so he can feel every breath. Morning can't come fast enough.

XXX

Leaf mold. Leaf mold and smoke. They used to be just road hazards. Now they're triggers, long fuses on a ticking bomb they'd taken for granted was defused long ago. Dean's triggers. Maybe he thought he'd outgrown the asthma, built up some kind of tolerance, but it rains every day now. The world's a giant spore, and the smoke and decay never get far off the ground. Dean's smothering.

And there's no sun. Not like they can hang the world out on the line to dry.

As ominous as the return of Dean's symptoms may be, it gives them a direction, something they've been lacking for months.

Sam picks the highways south, away from the Great Northern Woods and across the plains. Dean doesn't argue. Driver drives. Shotgun picks the road. New road. New rules. Same give and take. After doing as much research on asthma treatment as he can from pharmaceutical catalogs and drugstore pamphlets, long disclaimers full of warnings like "shouldn't be stopped suddenly" and "may increase the risk of asthma related death," he decides on a case of rescue inhalers, swipes them from a corner drugstore in Waupun, Wisconsin.

A few thousand miles of mostly wheeze-free nights later, Sam worries a little less. He knows he shouldn't, but it's too easy to find their comfort zone in the monotony.

If the concept of personal space was forgotten in the months of searching for other persons and finding none in the vast sea of space, well, it's completely abandoned with the reminder that what they have isn't exempt from dissolution just because it seems to have come through the impossible already. The entirely common and possible, plausible, can still sneak up and bite them in the ass. They could still raise their flag on the mountaintop just to fall backward off the cliff. So they pick a road drive into the unknown. What's familiar just might kill them.

XXX

Sometimes they give up searching the dial for a signal and put in a tape. Dean leans back in the driver seat, his head lolling against the bench so he can barely see the road over the tip of his nose. Sam sprawls against the passenger door, throws popcorn or M&M's against the side of Dean's stubbled jaw (they often forget batteries for the electric razor for days at a time) until Dean's eyes crinkle and he retaliates...by singing along.

"Kyrie eleison on the road that I must travel. Kyrie eleison on the highway in the night…"

They laugh through a couple choruses, together. Bad harmony's better than solo, just because it is. Eventually, their throats are sore, and the air's stale, and even rock ballads echo like bagpipes over the Highlands.

If Sam curls in on himself, falls asleep with one knee against the back of the seat and one across Dean's lap, he pretends not to notice when Dean loosens the lace on his boot so he won't have those itchy red welts across the top of his foot when he wakes up. And Dean never protests if Sam stretches and wriggles, ends with his ankle bone over the zipper of Dean's jeans, the toe of his boot in that ticklish spot at the bottom of Dean's ribs.

Other times, they're caught in a rainstorm, nothing but open road ahead, and not enough Turtle Wax or slime in the world to ease Dean's mind.

Times like that, Dean's foot hits the floorboard, and the Impala screams down the road in search of shelter or a break in the storm. Sam usually ends up crushed against Dean's side after they take the first off-ramp so fast they might as well be riding a Tilt-a-Whirl. He doesn't even bother trying to scooch back to his side, and when they finally find an overpass or an eave to park beneath, they take turns changing hands on the radio dial, isolation woven over helplessness that makes them desperate to find something, anything else in the static.

At some point, Dean whispers, "Just stop," his voice rough and sluggish in his throat. Instead of trading hands on the dial, he lifts Sam's off, presses his own over the top and into his knee, to stop the fidgeting. The latent quiver pulls it up higher on his thigh.

Eventually, they switch off the radio and let the rain lull them to sleep. Sam wakes up the next morning with a crick in his neck, stubble rash on his throat and a drool spot on the front of his t-shirt. It's all good. You know, for being the end of the world and all.

XXX

When their focus isn't consumed by hunting and running, there's time for reflecting, bouncing light into dark corners just to see what's there, where their possibilities lie. And like everything else they've encountered since Hell, the literal and the metaphorical become eerily hard to separate.

XXX

_"What is it?" Dean finally manages, smearing the slime between his fingers like he can perform chemical analysis with the whorls on his callouses._

Sam shrugs. "You want my educated guess, or my experienced one?"

The Dean Winchester patented blank stare. Okay, so it's probably not fair to split hairs with a guy who's a few hours out of the long, dark tunnel of delirium. Sam doesn't really expect him to answer, but he's been talking mostly to himself for the last couple days, and it turns out? Sam's a bit of a smart ass. He never paid much attention before.

He clears his throat, a little bit of hysterical laughter caught on his soft palate. "Well, my best guess is that the sulfuric acid, from the demons blood or whatever, got seeded into the clouds. It's exuded…"

"Exuded, heh," Dean laughs, sounding like he's exuding a little something down the back of his throat himself. "Sounds kinky."

"Okay, so it comes out…" Exasperated hand to his knee and an Elvis quirk to his lip. "Is

_**exuded**__when it rains and has some kind of chemical reaction with the minerals in the ground, the salt in particular, and the slime is a by-product." He hikes his knees up to his chest, rests his forearms atop, the denim stiff and crusty after he soaked all their clothing to counteract the rain._

"My experienced guess, you know, based on all the years we've spent hunting this shit, is that it's ectoplasm." He doesn't look up but pauses, expecting an argument. Doesn't get one. "Just, like, a higher form than we're used to seeing."

At the last statement, Dean rolls his eyes lazily up at him even as his lids drop to half-mast, jaw squaring. Sam can smell the sarcasm over the pickled eggs. Sometimes a silent Dean is as big a pain in the ass as a snarky one.

"There's a lot of mythology that suggests the earth isn't just a physical body," Sam stammers, because even he's never bought into that philosophy, but yeah, whole new world here. Skepticism be damned. "Lots of people believe it has a spirit." His fingers knead at the crusty denim over his knees, suddenly not confident enough in his rambling speculation to meet Dean's gaze. "So, I'm not sure exactly what it is we did down there, Dean. But it was enough to bring down Hell, and that took something way bigger than you, or me, or us." His eyes flick to Dean, and this time Dean looks away.

"Anyway, whatever we...channeled... or," he swallows, "sacrificed... to do that, it probably brought a whole lot of this slimy shit along with it. If one spirit can cover a wall just by walking through, imagine something moving through the whole planet."

"Huh, always wanted to be a Planeteer. That or a Power Ranger." When Sam doesn't laugh, Dean rubs his fingers together, deep in thought for several minutes, takes a sniff, this time without cringing. "Do you think it's...Did we ki..."

"Kill it?" Sam finishes. "The Earth? I don't know."

XXX

"Dude, do these make my ass look fat?" Dean twists around, craning his head over his shoulder and trying to look at his own ass in the mirror on the open changing room door.

"No, but they make your legs look kind of crooked," Sam says without turning his head. He's got his eyes fixed on the watches inside the jewelry case, not that time matters much at the end of days, but they're there if he needs one. It's strange not to need anything they can't readily have. Abandoned Wal-Marts for the win. Every schmuck town has one, and who needs designer brands when they'll probably stop for new in another week?

"How do you know? You didn't even look."

"I'm not gonna turn around and look at your ass so you can hit me with the silly string and fart spray you snagged from the outlet mall." He grins at his brother's bemused silence.

"Can't con a con man, I guess." Sam recognizes that distant tone, the one that says Dean's not giving up that easy, catches him looking around to figure out how Sam knew. Dean raises his eyebrows, swings the changing room door so he can see the spray can behind his back reflected off the glass of the watch case Sam's looking into. "I get it. A little smoke and mirrors. Aziz! Light!" He says, but the crazy accent he puts on it fades at the end, lost in the drag of thought.

"Dude, does all your education come from movies?"

Dean shrugs without turning around. "Nope. Some of it comes from t.v... Conjunction, junction, what's your function?" He sings under his breath, crazy-assed chin dip and head bob that snakes down his body in what only Dean could consider groovin'. Sam catches a glare off the door mirror playing over the counter top, swaying back and forth as the door opens and closes. He's about to say something to the effect of 'a good strappy pump will do wonders for your calves' but catches the faraway look on Dean's face, snaps his mouth shut. There's nothing quite as fascinating to Sam as Dean... thinking.

Dean gazes down at his pen light, flicks it on and off a few times, watching the beam bounce off the mirror and toward the bank of windows at the front of the store. He's been enthralled with mirrors lately. A lifetime ago, Sam would've thought he was just looking at himself. Dean's always so friggin' light on confidence when it comes to matters of intelligence and worth, but there's no shortage of hubris when it comes to his appearance. He's allowed that. Only now, Sam worries he's obsessing over that scar, the same way he obsesses over every little spot of rust on that car of his. He spends most of his mornings boiling coffee grinds in a saucepan and waxing the car. Sam stopped hanging around for those festivities about three weeks out of the Pit, takes the time to read, or, you know, cut his toe nails or something.

Dean fixes his gaze on the dark corner behind the returns desk and swings the door a few more times, then purses his lips and flicks the flashlight back off. Still humming "Schoolhouse Rock," he leaves the door mirror open and strolls over to a rack of earrings on a mirrored carousel. He spins the carousel, chin scrunched tight under his bottom lip. "Hoop or dangly? Hoop or dangly?"

"Uh, Dean..." He's finally lost his mind. It was bound to happen. Clever wit's only separated from madness by context.

"Dangly," Dean nods. "Definitely dangly." With one finger, he turns the display, just so, glancing back over his shoulder until, "Liiiiiiiiggghht," a grey shimmer of reflected light lands on a yellow, smiling Rollback sign in the returns kiosk, the darkest corner of the store illuminated. "Huh."

"Nifty trick. Like pinball with light." His voice doesn't sound as impressed as he feels. It's the practiced, unaffected tone of the kid who got too many cuffs to the back of his head in return for open adoration.

"Something like that," Dean dismisses. "Nothing new. Same principle as a periscope. What's the matter? They didn't have Advanced Trig at Stanford?"

"Fuck you." A chuckle and a couple knuckles to the shoulder. "Just on principle."

"Oooh, ya know, I've never fucked on principle before. On a lot of other things, carpet, metal, glass...in the water... on sand...a couple of pool tables... behind bars..." He takes longer between each statement, his voice trailing off wistfully. Finally he stands and adjusts his pants. "Damn, how'd we get into this conversation in a friggin' Wal-Mart, anyway? They don't even have any good skin mags."

Not that it should matter. In the last few laps of the country, they've managed to clean out every newsstand, enough to know the world ended in May, over a year after the last day they remember, and there isn't a girl in any of those mags they don't already know by name. Intimately. Sam grunts a little. Really, what's he supposed to say?

"Yyyyeah." Sam scratches behind his ear, forehead scrunched, and says, "Sooo, if cavemen and astronauts got into a fight, who would win?" Completely arbitrary, random, and ambiguous. Perfect.

Dean slides out of repressed and into swaggering confidence in the span of a breath. "_We_would. We're the friggin' princes of the universe." Dean turns toward the counter. "So, what's got you all squinty-eyed and introspective over here?"

"Nothin'," Sam dismisses, elbow on the counter. "Time's getting away with us a little. I was just looking at the watches. The ones that are set all say it's July 4."

"Independence Day."

"Yeah, kinda feels weird not to celebrate. I mean, the world might be a dead end at the moment, but it's all ours. Don't get any freer than that."

Dean claps him on the back and steers him toward the grocery aisles. "Celebration's what you want, then celebration's what you'll get." He finds a case of Bud on the end of the aisle, reaches in and takes out one long neck. "Let freedom ring." Popping the cap off, he hands the carton to Sam. "Your party, means you carry the beer. I'll supply the fireworks."

"Don't flatter yourself."

"Bitch."

"Jerk."

XXX

"Dean, so far I'm not impressed with your fireworks. I see lightning every day." He twists around on the hood of the car, can just see one of Dean's arms behind the open trunk lid. "What're you doing back there, anyway? I'm up here drinking alone, and you know that's bad news." Sad thing is, it really is bad news. He's not looking to get drunk. That never ends well. But entertainment's scarce at the moment.

He's not sure where he got his drunk and disorderly gene from exactly. He knows how it works. It's just chemistry. Alcohol dulls inhibitions, lets a guy do things he normally wouldn't. Thing is, everyone has different inhibitions. Dad's were good for keeping his temper in check, at least until he'd had a pint or so, and Dean? Well, Sam's not quite sure Dean even has inhibitions.

Sam can't help but wonder if maybe he got his from Mom. It's the only explanation he can think of for why alcohol makes him sing Culture Club and hump the legs of random... guys, after just a couple beers. He doesn't even know for sure when it started, just that Jess caught him putting his best Patrick Swayze moves on some guy from her Chem Lab and never let him forget how hot she thought it was. His alcohol tolerance has gotten higher under the weight of impending doom and the world, but well, there's good reason he usually leaves the heavy drinking to everyone else.

Not that he's ashamed to be the proud beneficiary of the horny, bisexual, drunk gene. He's fine with that. It's just not a part of himself he's really bothered to explore...much. Like, why complicate things when he's just as turned on by girls, and the world's full of beautiful women?

Except, now it's not. The world's not full of beautiful women, and even if he's ready to embrace his inner Boy George, well, the only dude around is his brother. Of course, he probably should've thought about that before he and Dean parked the car over a ravine with a case of beer to watch the lightning streak across the horizon.

"C'mon, man. Whatever you're doing back there you can do up here. Just, uh, bring a towel or something." The car vibrates beneath him as Dean slams the trunk closed.

"You're a real attention hound when you're drunk, aren't you? I bet you were the life of the party back in school." He swaggers around the front of the car, slides onto the hood next to Sam, something that looks vaguely like night vision goggles mated with a pair of rabbit ears planted in his lap.

"I'm not drunk." Sam takes a swallow off his bottle, a bad joke bubbling under flat beer. "Don't make me drunk. You wouldn't like me when I'm drunk."

"What makes you think I like you now?"

"You must. You come bearing gifts." He gestures toward Dean's lap. "Don't tell me... 3-D porn-o-vision."

Dean stares at the device, lower lip out slightly like he can't believe he never thought of that. "Do not mock the prototype. There's a lot of hours in this baby."

"What is it?"

"Your fireworks." Dean holds the invention out expectantly, and Sam shouldn't, but he hesitates. He's not even sure he knows where that thing goes, let alone where it's been. The aluminum foil helmets they wore on that M. Night Shyamalan movie to keep the aliens from reading their minds looked more sophisticated than Dean's new toy. The shiny bits glinting off the frame look a little like condom wrappers, and he's not entirely sure Dean wouldn't actually go there. "What're you waiting for? You want sparklers to make it more festive? Put 'em on."

"Not 'til you tell me what it does."

Dean shrugs. "It's a surprise. But if it works, it'll be better than porn, I swear."

Leaning back. "If it works? You don't know?"

"It wasn't finished until just now. I figured Fourth of July was as good a time as any to try it out."

"And you're using me as your guinea pig."

"Look, dude, it's a present. Do you want it, or don't you?"

Sam's not sure he does, but Dean's got that look on his face like Sam just asked for cereal when Dean already made Spaghetti-O's. "Fine. I'll be your Igor, Dr. Frankenstein, but if all my hair falls out from the gamma rays..."

"I'll knit you a cap, Rapunzel." He's already lowering the goggles over Sam's head, is careful with the strap in the back not to get it knotted in Sam's hair. When a few strands pull tight, Sam freezes reflexively, lets Dean smooth them free, his broad hand steady against the back of Sam's skull. "That good?"

Sam shrugs. "If good is completely blind with five extra pounds of hardware strapped to my head, then yeah. Peachy."

Dean pings him on the ear. "Always such a fucking joykill. Here." A soft snick accompanies a high-pitched whine, and the world takes on a greenish glow. It's better than pitch black, but Sam can't help craning his neck back and trying to look under the frames instead of through the lenses like the whole contraption is a baseball cap perched too far down his forehead. Dean stops him with a soft cuff to the back of the head, then puts a hand on each of Sam's cheekbones so the goggles are firmly over his eyes and turns him toward the sky. "What do you see?"

That's the sixty-five thousand dollar question, one Sam can't answer as the breath rushes out of his lungs. His head snaps back for a second like someone's snapped a picture in his face, then the light evens out, starts to swirl.

"Earth to Sam. Sammy? Whattaya see?"

Sam spends another second, mouth agape before his chest expands enough to support breath. "It's...amazing? What...what is it?"

"I don't know. You have to tell me what you see."

"Well, it's kinda like...It's light, only it's swirling across the sky in long ropes, arching and fanning out, like one of those static electricity globes in super slow motion."

"Huh. I guess they work then."

"Work to what? What is this, Dean?"

"It's the sun. Or, at least proof that there still is one. What you're seeing is, kinda on the order of an EMF detector, only on a larger scale, with the signal transformed into light patterns that allow them to be tracked by eye. It's basically the planet's electromagnetic field and solar wind."

Sam takes a few minutes just breathing and taking it all in. "Like the northern lights."

"Something like that." Sam hears Dean break open his own beer, take a long swallow, the Winchester toast to a job well done.

"When did you have time to do all this?"

An elbow to ribs. "C'mon, Sammy. How many coats of wax do you think the car really needs?"

"Ah." He should've known. "Why? I mean, it's amazing. Don't get me wrong. I could stare at this all night. But why?"

The scratch of fingernails through hair. Sam hadn't realized how different it sounds through Dean's hair now that it's grown out so long. "Just testing a theory."

"Which is?"

"Nothing. Just, I've been wondering, you know, whether this is really the world we left or just, like, something else entirely, that just looks like it. We never see the sun. For all we know, we could still be in Hell, just maybe the flip side."

"Another dimension."

"I guess."

"And this proves otherwise?"

"No, but it proves there's still a sun in the sky, and they say the sun is the key to life on this planet, so it's a start."

Sam can practically hear Dean thinking just then. Dean's mind, probably the only thing more fascinating than the sun. He reaches around behind his head, starts to undo the harness. "You need to see it for yourself."

He pulls the headset off, doesn't even mind the one or two clumps of hair that come with it, turns and places it over Dean's face in one smooth movement. He doesn't bother fastening the straps at the back, uses his own hand to bridge the gap, his palm to turn Dean's face to the sky.

Dean goes blank for a second, stops breathing altogether, the last breath a half-laugh like the joke's on him.

Sam knows whatever inner vision Dean had for how this would look has fallen far short of the mark. Dean's impressed himself, and that's hard to do. A couple of times, Dean straightens, ready to make some profound statement, then sinks back down, mouth snapping shut. Sam watches, suddenly bursting to the brim with the pride Dean's apparently unable to express in himself. He wishes Dean could see the grin on his face, but watches as Dean's jaw goes slack, instead, lips parted.

Sam doesn't think about it, though afterward, he'll probably blame it on the beer. But he's not drunk when he leans in and kisses Dean, not drunk when Dean starts to kiss him back. His hand holding the goggles in place loosens, and the lenses slip down as his other hand reaches up to the side of Dean's face to catch them, slow slide into something warm and soft he never knew was there.

He's about to deepen the kiss when the goggles clear Dean's eyes, and the second they do, Dean sits bolt upright fast enough that Sam slides off the hood and onto the ground. Dean nearly follows, but lurches back, hooking two fingers under the lip of the hood closest to the windshield.

Sam cracks his head on the ground, lies dazed for a few seconds as Dean's feet slide slowly back up and brace against the bumper. He breathes hard, partially from the whump of ground to skin, and partially from what came before, listens to Dean doing the same above him. He lays there longer than is necessary to recover, afraid to turn around.

Dean moves first, slides off the hood and reaches a hand out to Sam, helps him back up before retrieving the goggles. "Too many coats of wax, I guess." Sam doesn't miss the way he ducks his gaze toward the ground before taking the goggles back to the trunk.

Dean doesn't meet his eyes when he comes back either, tosses him another beer and slides up beside him. Sam can't think of one good reason not to get drunk anymore.

So he does.


	2. Chapter 2

**Part Two**

Something's different. Even with his brain swelling in his skull and something like a foam mattress set shoved down his throat, Sam has enough wherewithal to know he had way too much to drink if Dean looks different than he remembers. When did Dean's hair get so long, and when was the last time he shaved for Christ's sake? He's totally got some kind of Mad Max thing going on, and Sam's pretty sure that didn't happen in the blink of an eye.

Dean doesn't seem to notice Sam's awake, and that's just fine with Sam, because he's in no mood for Dean's jibes about whatever Celine Dion song Sam was singing karaoke to, or the greasy sausage probably left on the side of the bed just to make him puke. He stifles a groan and rolls back into the pillows where he fully intends to stay until he can at least remember last week. Last night will be longer in coming. He knows from past experience.

All five of them.

He reminds himself for the fifth time in his life to never, ever get that drunk again. Ever. Never.

Dean's a bad influence. Anyway, that's Sam's story, and it works for him.

God, he hasn't felt this shitty since...well, he can't remember the last time. And it's probably best to pretend he's still asleep, because Dean, no doubt, remembers. Dean never lets him forget.

Sam's pretty sure his baby book burned along with his first booties, and the little knit cap he wore home from the hospital after he was born. But he's equally sure Dean's got another book somewhere filled with things that are no less momentous but should in no way, shape, or form ever see the light of day. Probably has a quirky, twisted little title on it, like, "Sam Winchester: The Bed-Wetting Years, A Big Brother's Anthology of Snot Noses and Creamed Jeans."

"Fuck! That's gonna leave a bruise..."

A thunk followed by a tinny vibration pounds him over the head, hurts enough to make his eyes water down the back of his throat. He swallows and imagines he's drinking brain juice squeezed from his skull like a sponge. Yeah, now that's appetizing. If he hadn't already been on the verge of puking, that would've started the bile geysers pumping.

Newsflash. Bile mixed with stomach acid and a steady stream of swallowed spit? Hurts. Groaning at this point would be stupid and painful, but so is thinking. His brain doesn't get the memo until after he lets out a moan, and he has to throw an arm over his head to dampen the pounding. So much for pretending to be asleep.

Through squinted eyes, he catches Dean jerking a glance in his direction from in front of the window. He's got one finger sucked between lips like he's pinched it or cut it, two others wrapped in Band-Aids. Sam half wonders what the hell he's up to over there, but aborts the mission and clamps his eyes shut again.

"You might wanna shower before you pass out again. Those shorts have got to be gross." It's the kind of statement that should probably have more bite to it than it does.

Sam grunts. "Whatever." Dean's the one who always forgets to wash the underwear he's wearing on laundry day and ends up one pair short. Sam's underwear are... He takes mental inventory, and just as he thought, his underwear are... Eeugh. Friggin' nasty. "Son. Of. A. Bitch."

"Told ya," Dean says with a shrug before turning back to the window.

Sam slides his feet around to the side of the bed and onto the floor without opening his eyes. "Dude, I do not want to know." He ventures to glare out from under the ridge of his furrowed brow.

"Oh, sure. You don't remember. That's classic." Dean's open-mouthed frown is so not cute. "I'm hurt, man. Truly. Deeply. Down in my..." He thumps on his chest with the hand he's just been nursing, one finger reddened against his white t-shirt. "...down in my SOUL."

Sam blinks, which ain't easy with his forehead pinned over his eyelashes. He can't tell if that's all sarcasm or if there's something truly bitter in Dean's tone. Best sarcasm is always twisted truth. Dean goes back to doing whatever it is he's doing with the A/C unit, talking mostly to himself, which suits Sam just fine.

"Used, that's what I am. Just a toy. Just Wham, Bam, thank you Sam. See if the next town I drive you to has a water tower so you can have your friggin' morning after shower. God only knows why I fueled up the generator so you could even have hot water. I'm just a saint, I suppose. Now, if I could just get this A/C to run..."

Most of it comes back, then, the last months on the road, the end of the world, and the eerie way things haven't really changed that much, not for them. Dean's hair. Dean's hot new hair... _Oh shit_. Dean dragging his sloppy drunk and horny ass out of the car. Pinning Dean and his hot new hair and even hotter new brain against the wall while Dean fumbled with the lock, and...making a mess in his boxers. Dean making some kind of remark about being rode hard and put up wet when he tosses Sam onto the bed.

_Yeah. Shit_.

Dean keeps putzing with the thermostat, glances over his shoulder at Sam now and again like Sam's supposed to be listening to him, but the pounding between his ears..._ohshitohshitohshit_... still overrides most of what's trying to go through them.

A flash of red lightning through the curtains nearly blinds him, takes a circuit around his brain before high-tailing it down his spinal cord and into his gut. _Fuck_. High-tails it right back out. He lurches to a stand, eyes clamped shut and staggers in the direction he assumes to be the bathroom.

He's not at all thankful Dean fired up the generator when the bathroom light flickers on and he gets a good look at the brown hard-water stains in the toilet right before he paints them yellow. 'Cause, yeah, he was so needing that extra little push.

He's not sure if the clunk and rattle accompanying his retch and sploosh is evidence that he maybe swallowed a bucket of bolts while he was out of it or the sound of hail on the roof. Turns out to be neither when a cold rush of air shimmies down his back, and he cracks open his eyes to see a fine white powder blowing out of the register. Some of the dust, or what the fuck ever it is, lands in his eyelashes and refracts the light over the sink into shiny little colored haloes. Rainbows chased by a musty rust-flavored stench he wrinkles his nose against.

The cold air starts to chill the sweat on his brow and between his shoulder blades, mirrors the icicle of panic he's gagging around already. Pin pricks of dread skate down his stomach on beads of dirty sweat, pool in the waistband of his filthy boxers, and he crab walks back against the side of the tub, braces against it in his eagerness to peel the evidence away. His feet keep slipping out from beneath him when he tries to lift his hips, and he collapses in defeat, waits for a second wind that doesn't come attached to a wave of nausea.

One hand pressed into his forehead, he gropes blindly behind him for the faucet, grateful for the engineering genius of city water towers when he turns on the water, grimacing as he realizes the knobs are fashioned like a daisy wheel of women's legs. Dean's apparently holed them up in a brothel.

That should be funny.

It isn't.

His breath rakes in and out of his chest, too fast from the shock of cold tile against his back, punch of remembering at the forefront of his mind. The water's a little rusty but clears up in a minute, and true to his word, Dean's got the hot water heater running, too. Ain't hot enough.

Groaning, Sam draws his knees up to his chest, his bare feet leaving slick trails along the floor as he presses himself into the corner between the tub and the wall.

"Shit." He turns the water off again without getting in, hears the pipes groan at the sudden change in pressure, and starts to lever himself up, braces against the sink for a long moment, head tilted up just enough to glare at himself in the mirror between his sweat-soaked bangs. He's not getting in the shower without at least grabbing a clean pair of underwear out of his bag. He's not shy, not with Dean, but he's not putting these shorts on again, ever, once he gets them off, and he's not about to face Dean in just a towel. Not today. Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck.

Cold air from the vent swirls around behind him, cold from every angle like whatever's meant to keep it warm has been jerked away suddenly. Sam's a little surprised Dean's not standing behind him, gloating about getting the A/C running and demanding retribution for his trouble in some form of blatant ass kissery on Sam's part. Not that Sam can blame him for keeping his distance.

He crawls up the doorjamb and slides out into the main room, a shit-eating grin forced onto his face, best attempt at sheepish apology. It falls back into its scowl position when he finds Dean sitting on his bed, back to Sam, his shoulders slouched, and facing the window. It's the shoulder slouch that catches Sam's attention, turns his grin around, because that is not the posture of a man who's just single-handedly restored the convenience of refrigerated air to the best little whore-house in...well, wherever the hell they are. He thinks it's still Texas, not that it matters.

And Dean's shoulders don't do shuddering, shaking, jerking the way they are now, at least not that Sam's ever seen. If he has seen it, then it's most likely one of those memories he's blocked out, because he... Hell, it's wrong, that's all he knows. His stomach lurches again, this time on nothing but whatever emotion it is he's trying to swallow back.

"Dean..."

When Dean doesn't answer, Sam does his best dash to the other side of the room, crooked shuffle-step to spare his throbbing head, until he's between Dean and the window, looking down.

Dean's face is white like he took a hit from an angry canister of baby powder, completely dusted over except for a little half-moon shape under his eyes where he must've closed his lashes against the blast. Lightning flashes again, and there's a glint on the side of Dean's face Sam knows cannot be a tear track. Except it totally is, a fact Sam barely registers before Dean keels forward into his stomach.

Sam catches him against the front of his t-shirt, just dumb struck enough that his hands pat awkwardly over Dean's back in a half-hug before he even realizes he's doing it or has a chance to question what he's supposed to be consoling. The rain pelts against the window, blowing sideways against the side of the building, hard enough to smack the glass like a whip crack. Sam's head jerks from the sound, and maybe that's what clears the fog. Or maybe it's the way Dean's fucking clawing into his hip bones with tightening fingers, his entire body wracked with the twisting of his shoulders against some invisible bind. At any rate, Sam gets it like a sledgehammer between the eyes.

Mold. Mold out of the ducts, all over the room, all over Dean, and...

"Fuck!" He drops to his knees and nearly topples backward when Dean's leaning weight shifts with him. Sam pushes him back against the bed frame, watches in horror as Dean's head lolls on his neck, mouth gaping open while his chest convulses. Holding him up by fisting in his t-shirt, Sam leans forward, catches just a bleary glimpse of reflected lightning under the white-powdered eyelashes and presses his ear to Dean's mouth. Not even a fucking whistle.

"Dean!" He's pretty sure the t-shirt tears when he starts shaking his brother, feels a give beneath his fingers that makes him claw deep enough to leave tracks in Dean's skin. He shakes again as the iris disappears from Dean's eye. "Where's your inhaler? Dean!"

It should not be possible for a dude to be mostly unconscious and still look the collage of guilty, sheepish, embarrassed, and apologetic that Dean pulls off just then, but for once Sam's so friggin' grateful for all the months they've spent in comfortable silence, speaking whatever language it is brothers learn in the backseats of old cars on long highways. He doesn't need actual words to know Dean's left his inhaler, and the whole rest of the friggin' case, in the car, probably too busy lugging Sam's drunk ass in to give it a thought.

Sam presses Dean's, now lax, body down into the carpet (which is probably moldy, too, now that he feels it under his knees) and squints out the window as water sheets over it despite the edge of the eave he can make out a good six feet from the front of the building. He feels a smidge of guilt behind his belly button at wanting to call Dean a stupid fuck for leaving the inhaler outside, but figures he gets a by this time, since he's pretty sure what he's about to do makes him one as well. Standing, headache mostly forgotten, he presses his face to the glass, cups one hand over his eyes in an effort to see through the steady stream of water.

The car's not in front of the room, but he thinks he can see the front office sign battering against the wind just a few doors down. He falls back from the window into the bathroom and tears the shower curtain down from the rod, best he can do in a pinch. It's not big enough to cover all of him, but it'll have to do. Lofting it up over his head and pinching it together in front of his face, just enough of a peephole to see where he's going, he opens the room door. It blows in hard enough to knock him back with an oof against the wall, but he ducks his head and shoulders into it and goes out.

He's wet before he even clears the door jamb, the pickled egg stench of diluted acid thick in the recycled air pocket he keeps around his nose beneath the shower curtain. He squints against it best he can, and despite the pounding in his chest that tells him to dash out as fast as he can to minimize his exposure, he turns, taking the time to note the number on the door, (13. He's not amused) before closing it tightly behind himself. It won't do him any good to race out in search of Dean's inhaler if he can't find his way back.

Another gust of wind and accompanying wall of rain staggers him against the siding as he turns toward the office. Grasping the curtain tighter, even though he's already soaked through, Sam heads down the front walk toward the office.

The sign is suspended on chains from the eaves, and it disappears from his blurred vision for several long, heart-stopping seconds only to drop down suddenly when he's nearly beneath it. Were he not hunched against the storm, it would most likely have hit him in the forehead, and wouldn't that have been a twist of fate? To survive Hell and the end of the world only to have his head bashed in, corpse melting into a puddle of goo on the sidewalk while his brother suffocates in a shady motel?

He rounds the corner next to the office and breathes a sigh of relief. Dean's baby currently occupies the manager's reserved car port. Sam will grant, this once, that it's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen. He rushes around to the driver's side and strangles a sob in his throat when he realizes he forgot the keys, but in desperation, he looks through the window and finds them still in the ignition. Dean's been doing that a lot lately. It's not like anyone's going to steal it.

It doesn't take him long to find the inhalers. He grabs two spares because he can't remember when was the last time Dean used it or how to tell how much is left. He's about to turn back into the storm and run back to the room when he thinks better and climbs into the driver's seat. The car can stand a little rust. Sam can't.

Fishtailing through the parking lot, he drives right up to number 13, doesn't even bother with the shower curtain as he dives inside.

Dean hasn't moved from the carpet where Sam left him. In fact, Dean isn't moving _at all_. "No...nonononono...no." Sam doesn't even register the carpet burns, dampened flesh stripping away as he falls to his knees. Yet, he feels the stab of protectiveness as water drips off his sopping hair and into Dean's face, because that's fucking acid rain he's dripping for Christ's sake. He's already fumbling with the inhaler, trying to fit it in his hand so he can trigger it with one and hold Dean's head up with the other, when he realizes it won't do any good.

Dean's lips are already blue-tinged, his forehead waxy-looking, and the little lines of exertion crinkling his brow and the corners of his eyes are just...gone, not smoothed away or pressed out by some inner calm, just erased. Like it's easy to just make it all go away. There's a whole lot of empty in the world leftover from what went away. But the biggest, darkest void is right here on this carpet.

His hands shake so hard he almost drops the friggin' inhaler, and then, when he doesn't, he almost throws it across the room anyway, because he doesn't fucking know what to do. Dean probably needs a breathing tube, but even if Sam had one he'd have no idea how to use it.

"Shit!" It's either instinct or desperation or one inspired by the other, but Sam's got all that muscle and physical strength from powering on, and if he can't finesse his way through something, then brute strength has always been a good last resort. He feels a little awkward, but Dean's mouth is already open. Sam forces his thumb into the side of his brother's jaw just to move his teeth out of the way, tilts his chin back, and pinches his nose. He probably takes a bigger breath than he needs, but goddammit something is getting through there. Clamping his mouth over Dean's, he blows, feels Dean's nostrils expand beneath his fingers. His own cheeks puff with the resistance. Dots swim behind his eyes the way they used to when they were kids trying to blow up punching balloons. He remembers being the only one who could ever do it by mouth even before they knew about Dean's asthma, how friggin' proud he'd been to blow up his own and then one for Dean. But this air doesn't move.

He's held off pulling away for another breath as long as he can when he makes a last ditch effort, steels his cheeks. Dean's chest rises, then, not a lot, but something gets through. That's all Sam needs. A way in.

He draws in another deep breath, then closes his throat off and puffs the inhaler into his mouth. Then he seals Dean's mouth again and forces the medicine into his lungs. He holds it there for a second, Dean's chest just a fraction of an inch higher off the floor than before, then backs away. Forgetting to breathe again for himself, he waits while Dean's lungs deflate. It's a slow leak, just a little whisper of a whistle behind it, but it gets out. He takes another breath, this time just for himself, and waits some more.

After a second, Dean's belly starts to twitch and roll. Sam's not sure if it's Dean trying to breathe or throwing up. It seems too weak to do either, but it's progress, he tells himself as he expels another puff of mist into his mouth. A second forced transfer leaves him trembling as much as Dean, but he's convinced the second breath came easier than the first. Just a little.

Sam pants. An annoyed grunt escapes clenched teeth as he flips his dripping hair back away from Dean's face. Suddenly, the little tremble in Dean's belly becomes a full clench, and his entire body arches against it. A long, thready hiss of air trickles past Sam's fingers, and when it stops, Dean bucks forward, barely missing Sam's chin with his head.

He doesn't miss anything with the yellow, foaming vomit that bubbles out of him, but Sam keeps his gorge down, the thumb at Dean's jaw keeping it propped open and turned to the side until it all spills out. This time Dean coughs before the next splash of vomit boils out, and Sam doesn't even care that it covers his arm, splashes onto his leg.

When Deans stops gagging, his coughs mostly dry and tight, Sam places the inhaler between his lips and counts, "One, two, three...puff," sighs with relief when Dean responds by taking a breath on command.

Behind them, the air conditioning unit makes a clunk, and Sam lurches to unplug it before it can spit out any more of the mold spores from the ductwork. Should've thought of that right away. Thought they were being so careful...

Sam's skin crawls now, this eerie feeling like everything is poison, polluted and clinging. He hoists Dean up, over his shoulder and carries him into the bathroom. He shuts the door almost as an afterthought, already turning on the hot water in the sink, and then the shower. He wants as much steam as he can get, doesn't know how long the heater's even been running. One hand under the shower to test the temperature, he decides it's safe, adds a little more cold as a precaution, and lowers Dean into the tub, propping him far enough back to keep the water on his chest and legs and out of his mouth and nose. Sam pauses just long enough to strip off his soaking t-shirt and shorts, then climbs in, pulling Dean up against his chest. He's more concerned with getting the steam in Dean's lungs and the mold off his skin than about the itch he can already feel in his legs from the acid burns that will surface in a couple days.

Peeling off Dean's t-shirt, he plops it onto the floor beside the tub, and the heavy, sodden way it just splooshes to the floor registers in his ear and settles in his bones. It reminds him of the deer, of poking through her entrails looking for explanations; why she lived; why she had to die; alone. These are just clothes, something they shed like lizard skin and leave behind. There's nothing in the pockets, because they carry nothing with them. Nothing for anyone to find and know they were here. No one to find them. Dean propped against his chest, barely breathing, is the only thing keeping Sam from being completely alone. For all the fighting and begging for his independence, he's never really been alone. Alone is scary. Scarier than Hell.

But Winchesters don't do afraid, keep being forced to practice at it like piano scales, but they skip out on the recital. His head falls back against the wall, eyes shutting against the dark. One hand stays on Dean's chest, feels the breaths start to come deeper and more steady. When Dean sleeps, stubbled cheek against Sam's pec, Sam sleeps, too.

_They're too tired, been running on something less than fumes and more than gumption for longer than either can remember. Five steps away from the end of the earth is as far as they make it before they fall, not afraid of whether there be dragons behind them. They've been there and done that, don't have plans to do anything else without sleeping first._

_The fever overtakes them while they sleep, and it's almost too much to wake from. Somehow, between the searing heat and Dean's body shaking beside him, Sam cracks his eyes open. One of them. Barely. They feel cemented shut, crusted over with matter that works its way between the lashes when he tries to pry them apart and starts his eye to watering enough to free it up the rest of the way._

_Disoriented, his limbs like lead, he falls on old habits, presses the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. Feels like dirt caked over his forehead. Feels like, but scraping it away stirs an itch under his skin that claws its way out and trickles into his eyes. His fingers come away sticky, and it's too dark to see, especially with just the one eye open. The tang of iron's strong enough to taste._

_"Dean..." Sam doesn't recognize his own voice, can't honestly remember when he's last needed it. The only thing that answers is his pounding heart._

"Dean!"

XXX

He heads west as fast as he can go without red-lining the tachometer, both hands tight on the steering wheel. Dean's still wearing his wet jeans. Sam didn't want to chance cutting them off, so it's plenty warm inside the car, musty as an old gym locker, but Sam doesn't open the window or turn on the blower. What used to be just the grey bleak of the landscape looks like something more sinister, black decay underneath a dusting of lighter spores like powder makeup on the face of a clown. The open highway's never been this claustrophobic, and he wonders if they climbed out of Hell, death by blood and fire, just to have the world smother them under a pillow. Inside the car's the only place safe and familiar, the only place Sam has control, and he doesn't want the world coming in. Besides, too much noise drowns out the wheezing. He's not going to let himself forget again.

When Dean wakes up, Sam feels his eyes against the side of his head, braces his jaw a little tighter against it. He doesn't look. It's not Dean's fault, except the part where the dumbass left his inhaler in the car, but there's no one else to blame for the way Sam's heart's been pounding in his chest for the last two hundred miles or the throb in his joints from bracing against whatever's trying to tear him apart. Dean's got asthma, but Sam's choking, and it's pissing him the fuck off.

"You look like shit," he says without looking. Sam doesn't have to look to know. Dean sounds like shit, so it doesn't really matter if he looks it, all smells the same. "I'll stop when we get to Waco. Go back to sleep." He's more scared than surprised when Dean does.

He doesn't actually stop in Waco, but just the other side of it, outside the Woodway subdivision. Not bothering to wake Dean, he finds a pharmacy from which he takes way more than he hopes to ever need but somehow doesn't feel safe leaving without, and then spends half an hour in the Super Kmart getting new clothes and raiding the electronics department for a cigarette lighter adapter. It wouldn't normally take him that long, but he's got something in his eye, a bit of grit or dust or something. Makes it hard to focus.

He blinks and swallows, a constant drip in the back of his throat from his tear ducts trying to flush out his eye.

Dean's awake when he gets back the car and gives him a look somewhere between shell-shocked and 'you got some 'splainin' to do, Sammy.' Sam doesn't stare back long enough to decide how much of it's the asthma and how much is residual from being molested by his baby brother. Instead, he fishes through his cart and tosses a couple boxes across the seat along with the fresh clothes even though Dean's jeans have already air-dried.

"Since you're awake, I got a project for you. I need you to rig that to run off the cigarette lighter. I got an adapter that should work."

Dean clears his throat and sits up slowly, trying to figure out what Sam's thinking with a silent sigh of relief Sam only "hears" in the softening of his jaw. Dean doesn't want to talk, and for once, Sam's inclined to agree.

"What is it?" His voice is rough, tired, but still rings with brotherly sarcasm, as he turns the plastic container over in his hands. Sam's a little surprised Dean doesn't recognize it, but then, Sam somehow managed to block out Dean's Achilles heel entirely until it kicked him in the ass. "Popcorn popper?" Dean ventures. He pulls out a piece of tubing, makes a face that says 'guess not' before trying again, this time with a little twist at the corners of his lips. "Breast pump?" He tries to waggle his eyebrows, but it's unconvincing, especially with the one held on by scar tissue. "Home colonoscopy kit?"

Sam tosses the rest of the stuff in the back of the car and slams the door. "Something like that. Can you do it?"

"The colonoscopy?" Sam doesn't laugh, so Dean pulls a pliers and a wire snip out of the glove compartment, wincing when the movement seems to tax strained muscles in his chest and gut. "Yeah, it's a pretty easy rig."

"Good." It's all Sam can bring himself to say. There's more wagging on his tongue and trying to poke its way past his teeth, but it hasn't consulted with his brain at all, completely irrational and sure to start a fight. Dean doesn't need that right now, and Sam doesn't want it either, so whatever willpower hasn't been crushed by panic, shock, and adrenaline, he uses to button his lip. He's more out of practice at that than he thought, though, misses the comfortable silence broken with comfortable banter. Still, when Dean finishes his rewiring, Sam just says, "Good," again, and keeps driving like he can outrun what's already seeped in and burning through his veins.

XXX

_All those days thirsting, scraping their tongues raw for just a drop of water, and now it pelts the ground in an endless deluge, painting the landscape shades of yellow and brown, edges a slimy black. Acid rain. Fire water. The world ended in fire from the sky, after all. Just not quite how they'd expected._

_Dean's been ranting on the edge of consciousness since Sam awakened, and Sam's burning up himself. They're both scabby, sickly like stray cats, any exposed skin crusty and red._

_Seems like, after Hell, a little fever should be just that. Small. But frailty's the one thing that makes this all real. Hell's about suffering without relief, and Heaven's... well, this can't be Heaven. Only the real world could be this paradox of bittersweet that comes from breaking and mending, falling and standing again. Only reality rewards endurance. In Heaven there are no tunnels. In Hell, no light at the end. And Sam has to believe there's a light here, somewhere beyond the clouds. They can't die helpless in a crypt after climbing for days. That's not how it works. It just isn't. They suffer, but they make it through. Always have. Have to now, too._

_When Sam was fourteen, he and Dean both got the chicken pox. All their moving around had managed to keep them from coming in contact with it before then. Thing was, chicken pox are worse the older you are when you get them. Sam remembers too well long baking soda baths that did nothing to stop his skin crawling, and by the time the fever broke, he'd been ready tie himself behind the car and let Dean drag him down a gravel road._

_Of course, he'd had it easy. Dean almost died. Always was prone to spiking high fevers._

_Kinda like now. Both of them covered in acid burns and hot with infection, and Sam's watching Dean twitch in the corner. He'd prefer the gravel road._

_Back then, there'd been bags of ice to fetch, calamine lotion to apply, bedsheets to change. There were things to be done to stay one step ahead of the crisis and the panic whirring in his belly like the gears of a windup toy teetering on the edge of a table._

_Now there's nothing to do but wait. Call it a learning experience. If the view from the front of the crypt is any indicator, they have a whole new world to learn the ins and outs of. The first lesson's an out. If they make it through this, they'll know enough to stay out of the fucking rain._

_He watches Dean writhe and curl in on himself, wonders who he has to bargain with to make it stop. Despite the Latin scripture engraved in the walls, wrought iron crosses atop stone pillars to symbolize a gate to the other side, Sam's having a hard time finding religion._

_He's pretty sure they won't die here, though. A crypt is too convenient a place for dying. Winchesters never do anything that rational. Call it blind faith. Sam calls it experience._

TBC

A/N: For some reason the site wouldn't let me upload the whole chapter, so it continues in the next one.


	3. Chapter 3

XXX

He doesn't stop again until they're far enough into the Texas Hill country that it's mostly mounds between them and the horizon, not rotting trees and their dangling jellyfish tentacles of Spanish moss. Then he figures it's safe to pull over, high on a rise where he hopes it's driest. Dean hears the engine cut out the way a colicky baby knows exactly the second you've put him back in his crib. Straightening in his seat like he hasn't been sleeping again, Dean sheepishly uncurls his fingers from the front of his t-shirt where he's been tugging at the collar like it's strangling him.

"Hungry?" Sam asks, a spork and a couple cans of tuna in olive oil drop to the seat. Dean starts to shake his head, but Sam stops him. "Eat." It's an order, or at least he intends it to be, tries to mimic the inflection Dad always used when he said 'jump' to make Dean answer, 'how high.' It doesn't feel right, though. The part of him that's still powerless and loose, out of tune like a cat gut string on an ancient tennis racquet, wants to beg, plead, coddle, but the rest still twangs and twists in knots.

He makes a pointed glance in Dean's direction to be sure he's eating. He has to look away as Dean takes too-small bites, chews a couple of times, then pockets the food in the side of his mouth so he can take a breath, still not getting enough air without breathing through both his nose and his mouth. Sam can remember the colds he used to get as a kid where his nose got so stuffed he felt like he was drowning every time he tried to swallow, and he's exhausted just watching Dean pick his way through one can of tuna, remembering too well the weight on his chest.

Sam pretends he's just inspecting Dean's handiwork on the cord he rewired, not looking away so that _he_can get a decent breath. Dean doesn't notice, too busy reasoning out the size of bite to take, how many chews before swallowing to minimize the paralyzing seconds between when he can't breathe at all.

Sam waits until Dean's halfway through the second can of tuna, rubbing absently at his forearms and at his legs under his jeans before reaching in the back and pulling out the rest of what he got from the pharmacy. He doesn't meet Dean's gaze the whole time he's setting things up, though he almost asks Dean to read the instructions for him while his eyes refuse to stop watering.

Dean figures out what he's doing before Sam's quite finished, makes a noise Sam recognizes as understanding mixed with embarrassment. That's Dean's usual preamble to vomiting bits of macho mixed with damaged pride.

He doesn't. That's almost worse.

Instead, he watches Sam plug the nebulizer into the cigarette lighter and takes the breathing tube when it's offered without more than an eye roll.

XXX

West Texas should be safe enough. There was never much of anything there to begin with, nothing to rot and mold over, pollute the air, but Sam's well into the oil fields and still driving with his foot near to the floor when it starts raining.

Dean takes the nebulizer hose out of his mouth. Sam's been expecting it for the last hundred miles or so, constantly glancing in Dean's direction then back again like a Bingo player with ten cards all one number away from jackpot.

"It's raining," is all Dean says before taking another hit.

Sam doesn't answer. If he opens his mouth he's almost positive his tongue will snake out, forked, and barbed, and thirsty for blood. Reprisal. It demands reprisal for having stayed bitten between his teeth. Sam knows, if he speaks, he'll say something he's sure is more appropriate unspoken. It'd start with how Dean's health isn't a joke, and how he has to take care of himself. True, yes, but nothing Dean doesn't know, so redundant and pointless. Thing is, Sam doesn't know how far it'd go from there. He's pretty sure something on the order of, 'I don't want to be here alone,' would made it onto the table before he could turn it off. That's better unspoken, because this isn't about Sam. Not about Sam's health or Sam's sudden fear of alone.

Except it is-the Dean part of Sam, which is really quite a large chunk of the Sam pie.

So he doesn't answer right away. It pisses Dean off when he doesn't answer. They drive another mile or so in silence as the rain picks up momentum. To Dean's credit, he tries not to say anything else. He shifts around in his seat a dozen different ways, raises up and sits back down like his shorts are suddenly bunched awkwardly, makes sure the leather groans when he plops onto it, and Sam can feel him darting his eyes expectantly over, but Sam doesn't take the bait. Why would he? It's his trap.

The tube comes out a second time with a huff when Dean spits it out rather than removing it by hand. "Sam! It's raining."

"Really? I've had the weather band on all day, haven't heard a peep out of it."

"What the fuck's your problem?"

"I don't have a problem, Dean. You have a problem."

"And it's going to get better by driving until the tires melt off or the grill rusts out?"

"Maybe. If we make it as far as New Mexico before then."

"What's in New Mexico?"

"Katharine Heigl." Sam can't help the sarcasm. Dean deals out his fair share, but there's a reason Sam was on the debate team in high school. He just usually hones the barbs down a little before lashing out. Blunt works just as well on Dean, and Sam's feeling a little Cro-Magnon these days. "What do you think?" he asks. "The desert."

"Sam, find a place to pull over." Dean waits for the beat of a breath, but no more. "Now!"

Sam hits the gas harder, the little bit of space between his foot and the floor closing. "The desert, Dean. Clean air and dirt. No mold, no mildew..."

There's an off ramp ahead, and a turnaround under the highway, but Sam has every intention of going past it. Has to get to the desert.

Dean's hand closes over his on the steering wheel, a slow steady pull toward the shoulder that gets stronger and more insistent. "Sam..." Not an order, just a silent please left unspoken in the hitch at the end.

Sam swallows, feels his teeth grind in the back, but his foot eases off the gas, even while he fights to keep the car headed straight down the road. "A place where you can be safe." Huh. That doesn't exactly come out the way he intends, the last little bit an unsure whisper of a confession he hadn't even known he was about to make.

He deflates enough to turn off.

It's like that inch of control he gives up is the last one he has, and by the time the car rumbles to a stop under the turnaround, Sam's hands are shaking too much to turn the ignition off. The windshield wipers start to scrape and whine over the glass, the rain already puddled beneath them on the ground, but Sam doesn't turn them off, can't understand why the glass is still streaked and blurry.

Dean reaches over him and takes the key out of the ignition, smooth and completely in control.

He takes Sam by the wrist, hard. "Stop!"

"I did," Sam says, still focused on the windshield like he can will it to clear up just by staring hard enough.

Dean's grip on his wrist tightens even more. _Caught in a trap...I can't walk out of, because I love you too much baby... Shit,_Sam knows he's losing it when random lyrics start singing in his head.

"No. Stop _this_." Dean's holding his wrist so hard Sam feels the bones move around and fold together, tendons stretching, and it's better than the burn on the back of his skin. He can't help the little stutter of his eyelashes when Dean's grip tightens the cuff of his sweatshirt around his forearm, the rough fabric burns so good against the itch underneath. Dean must see, because he pushes the sleeve all the way up, says something under his breath, or maybe out loud, but Sam can't hear that. He's already busy tugging at his collar with his other hand.

"I said stop!" This time, just loud enough to end in a whistle, followed up with a sharp intake between his teeth. Sam stops, then, and winces more at the look on Dean's face than the sight of the raised red spots on his arms. He swears he doesn't remember scratching hard enough to make those scabbed-over lines between the splotches, but there's something under his fingernails that could be skin.

"You went out in the rain?" Dean asks without looking up from the mess Sam's made of his flesh. The only real question is the implied, 'how could you be so stupid?' since the answer's obvious.

Sam copies his inflection exactly when he says, "You left your inhaler in the car?" Dean shouldn't be surprised. They walked into Hell together. A little rain is supposed to stop them?

Dean reaches a thumb up and across Sam's eye, and for a second, Sam can see the crease over the bridge of Dean's nose, the way his eyes dart over Sam's face, searching for something. Dean's thumb comes away wet, and the warmth of his palm over Sam's cheek draws attention to the cold, damp lines down the side of his face. Dean wipes his other eye, and Sam can't help but tip his head into Dean's hand, hadn't realized how much the irritation and the cold were clawing at him. And now, all he wants to do is claw back, hurt it more than it hurts him.

Dean won't let him, fixes those vice grip hands of his around Sam's wrist again the second he tries to scratch. "Dammit, Sam. Is there any place that didn't get wet?"

Sam wants to answer. Yeah, there's a spot in the middle, from his sternum to mid-thigh, that the shower curtain kept mostly dry, but even that tingles, since all his nerve endings seem to run cross ways through it. Legs to brain. Brain to fingers. Fingers to legs, to arms, to chest, to forehead. Everything twitches either with the pain or the need to do something about it, and a shotgun blast of rock salt is starting to sound downright soothing.

So, Sam doesn't answer, but it doesn't matter. Dean's already got his door open. The nebulizer falls off the seat and onto the floor, makes a little slosh as the medicine spills out.

"Dean!" It's supposed to sound like, 'get your ass back in here and take your medicine,' but it comes out more like, 'where are you,' when Sam realizes his eyes have flooded over again. He hates the way it sounds, like he's lost and afraid, because he just friggin' drove them across the state of Texas, saved his brother's life, and got him medicine for the love of God. He's got everything under control. Except this itch, and the fact that he can't really see anything more than a foot in front of his face.

"Dean!" That one does not have permission to squeak out, but it does. Kittens have made more confident noises. Back when there were kittens. Dean answers with a rustle of paper. Funny how the rest of the world graduated to plastic bags, but pharmacies and liquor stores stuck with paper.

The crinkling sound makes his scalp crawl, like a fine-toothed comb being yanked through his hair.

He turns his head with a jerk when the driver door opens, a crazy wobbling movement like the eyes of those dolls that open and close depending on how you tip them, sort of tottering around a focus that isn't quite clear. Then Dean's thumb breaks through the murk again, inches from his face, and Sam turns into it, seeking anything steady enough to stop the world sloshing clumsily around him.

"Hold still." Yeah. Easier said than done. Sam's doesn't know how to float without kicking. But Dean doesn't really give him the chance to disobey. Fingers prying apart your eyelids is one of those things that makes you freeze whether you want to or not. Sam barely sees the end of the syringe in the very furthest corner of his vision before Dean depresses the plunger and floods his eye with saline solution. He almost jerks away, just reflex, but melts into the cool wash after a second.

Too soon, the flow stops, and the fire flares back up again. He can't even blink against it, as Dean keeps his lids pried apart and leans in. Dean looking in his eye, looking _at_his eye is the most bizarre kind of detached sensation. Sam can't help trying to meet Dean's gaze, but Dean doesn't see him, just his eye, has this look on his face like he's dissecting a bug or trying to read someone's broken handwriting.

Dean must feel him starting to squirm under the press of his fingertips and his gaze, because he leans back with a sigh. "Looks like you didn't burn your eye, but you've probably scabbed up your eyelids. The way you're tearing up, I'm surprised you didn't wreck us." He looks over his shoulder and up at the sky as the rain stops, and just before his eye starts to water and smart again, Sam notices the way Dean's throat hitches around a cough he's trying to suppress like a yawn in church. A pat on his thigh, somewhere between nudge and caress, and Dean says, "Scooch over. I'm driving. Don't wanna be stuck under here all night."

He's barely scooted an inch when Dean drags him back by the waistband of his jeans. He doesn't look back, though he's got a, 'what the hell' forming on the tip of his tongue. It's a good thing, because Dean cuffs him on the back of the head.

"Off!"

It takes Sam a second to figure out the thing Dean wants 'off' is his shirt. At least, that seems to be the message of the hands tugging the hem out of Sam's pants. He bats Dean's hands away partly because... well, that's his brother, and he's pretty sure he's supposed to protest. His hand's the only thing protesting, though. His hips slide back an inch on the seat so Dean can get the shirt off.

The brush of rain-dampened air over his chest and stomach makes his breath catch and his pulse speed up by several beats a minute.

"Better?"

"Yeah." Answering pulls the stopper out on the breath he's been holding, and his stomach twitches out of sync with his chest.

"Good." Dean drops a tube of something Sam figures is burn cream into Sam's lap. "Now, stop scratching. You'll get an infection."

Neither one says it's probably too late for that.

XXX

_Turns out there's a good holistic remedy for acid burns, something a little more practical than not fucking getting rained on in the first place. A good old salt of the earth cure that Sam finds by accident, in the first days out of Hell, while Dean's unconscious, delusional with infection._

_Of course, Dean, the king of reconstituted, trans, gamma, nuked, and recombinant, wants nothing to do with all-natural._

_"Dude, get that stinkin' shit away from me," he grumbles, batting Sam's hand away from his forehead without opening his eyes._

_"Welcome back to the land of..." Sam pauses, eyes fixed on the faint red glow coming from under the slab door of the crypt. "...slime and Tootsie Rolls." He presses one of the candies past Dean's slime covered lips, against the protests, and sits back against the wall. "C'mon, eat up. 'ts the only thing I could find in the car that might still be edible. They say Tootsie Rolls never go bad. I think I read there's still some of the original batch around somewhere."_

_Dean's jaw starts to work slowly. Two days of force-fed Tootsie Rolls and holy water, and Sam's managed not to choke or drown either of them yet. Of course, Sam can't take all the credit for not choking his brother. Dean's had a lot of practice eating from his death bed. Probably enough to write a dissertation on how the zombie finds brains to eat without any actual brain function of its own to guide it. Sam's had more practice feeding Dean when Dean can't feed himself than he cares to remember._

_Dean's better today. His jaw actually stutters a little at the mention of the car, and Sam knows what he wants to ask. "Your baby's still right where we left her, parked under that old railroad bridge with all the graffiti on it. Remember? You made that joke about Prince."_

_"Mmmm," Dean's jaw works faster, his eyes fluttering open, pale red gleam under his lashes a little too much like the hungry glare of hell's hounds. After a hard swallow, he finishes. "Mmmovie was fucked up."_

_"Yeah, it kinda was." Sam doesn't ask how Dean ever ended up watching a rock opera. They had that conversation a lifetime ago, before they took on Hell and won. He's not exactly waxing nostalgic about the good old days._

_He doesn't tell Dean the car's fine, but the road from here to there is gone. They've never been confined to the beaten path, anyway. And if Sam hadn't been forced to stagger through the upturned graves and rubble, he'd never have fallen into that puddle of slime._

_Serendipity's all they have, since all they know is gone, and planning for the unknown is, well, impossible. But they can try. What they learn today might come in handy tomorrow._

XXX

The drive through the night isn't so bad. Sam dozes soundly, mostly by choice, because sleeping seems to be the only way to ignore the rash spreading up his limbs and goose-stepping through his nerve endings with pointed bayonets. He wakes halfway to find Dean poking through old maps with a pen light. He's vaguely aware of the chill of sweat trickling over his collar bone and down his chest by the lingering dreams of fingertips tracing the trail. Part of him wants to ask where they're going. If Dean's got the maps, then he has to have a plan, but the rest of him is busy staying half asleep and not being sorry the fingertips he's dreaming of just might be Dean's.

Morning lightning retreats over the desert in a way he feels against bare skin. The way he used to feel the static on a balloon by the movement of hairs on his arm.

His senses keep surfacing against his will while he's busy squinting against the light of day. He's hot in his skin, not tired but not ready to come out of the cocoon he's awakened into. Ignorance is bliss, they say, and there's not a whole lot of bliss to go around these days. Sam'll take what he can get.

The leather squelches behind him, his back alternately sticking to the dry spots and sliding over the spots he's already dampened with sweat. He's a little surprised Dean hasn't scrounged up a towel in the name of saving his upholstery, smiles a little to himself that some things really are more important to Dean than his car. He's good with that, too.

His jeans still make him want to scratch through the denim, rough enough to irritate, but too loose for any decent friction. Well, loose in every place except one. He wonders how much shit Dean would give him for shucking those, too. It's not like Dean's never seen him in his underwear before. Shifting around in the seat at just the thought of being rid of the jeans, Sam's boot kicks against something on the floor with a hollow plastic thunk. The nebulizer, no doubt. Dean would never have bothered to pick it up off the floor. He has a nasty habit of not taking care of himself. Most days, Sam doesn't mind doing it for him. They've had some of their best conversations while one or both of them is knocking on Heaven's door.

Seems to be happening a lot since Heaven's door got slammed in their faces.

XXX

_Long stringers cling to Dean's eyelashes. A grimace works its way over his cheeks. Yeah, Dean's doing better, if covered from head to toe in slime for the last day and a half and just now realizing it is better. He moves his hands up to his face as if to wipe away whatever gak is caked there. They get as high as eye level, then turn back and forth, long lines of the crud lacing together. He gets the same expression on his face he used to get when Sam was little and hawked into his hand instead of a Kleenex. Heck, kids that age don't know when they're going to puke half the time. How was Sam supposed to know the difference between a harmless sneeze and the mating call of the loogie slug?_

_"Don't pull the eew face, Ernest. That stuff worked wonders on the acid burns and kept your fever down long enough for the Cipro to get an upper hand on the infection."_

_Dean clears his throat like he's been eating the gunk and not just wearing it. Sam's not saying it isn't possible to eat it. He's actually been kinda thinking it might be a good form of slow-release hydration, but no, he hasn't been using his unconscious brother as a guinea pig._

_Besides, it tastes like shit._

XXX

"Dean!" Sam scrambles up to a sitting position, bangs his head on the sunblind which has made it its mission in life to fall halfway open every time they stop. Sam puts a hand to his forehead, still squinting in case there's blood. How the hell had he not noticed until now that he can't hear Dean wheezing? "Dean!" The pain in his head melts away under his hand, and he looks into the driver's seat.

Except he can't see anything. He realizes with a jerk that his eyes are glued shut, and trying to force them apart with just the muscles in his eyelids and brows makes them grate over his corneas, brings tears welling out at the corners. He almost falls out when the door opens behind him, but Dean catches him, props him back up in the seat while he tries to get a handle on the panic kicking him in the stomach.

"Where were you?" It's pissy, and he knows it, doesn't really care.

"Good morning to you, too. Had to take a piss. Fucking nebulizers and inhaled steroids..."

"I can't see." That's not supposed to be an accusation, but it sounds like one even to him. It's not Dean's fault he picked just that second to wake up all alone. Not his fault that alone is not as appealing to him as it was when he was fourteen and went through a lot of lotion.

"I'm not surprised. You've got enough shit in your eyelashes to spackle a shower stall." Dean's hands are back on his face, and for some reason, that loosens the constriction around Sam's chest so he can breathe again. He can feel Dean's thumbs brushing over his cheekbones, and tips his head back as they slide cautiously up toward his eyes. "Stop trying to open them. If you scratch your eyes, we'll really have a problem. I've got a pan of water heating up on the manifold. Just sit tight while I get a warm rag."

Sam nods, but Dean takes a second to brush the bangs off his forehead before tapping him on the chest, and Sam doesn't really care about getting his eyes open anymore. Not if it means Dean takes his hands away. He swallows against the cold shudder left in the wake of Dean's touch when the door creaks open farther and Dean steps away; swallows again when the hood slams shut and the gravel crunches closer and closer. Turning toward the door is half to meet Dean and half to adjust his pants, which are still too fucking tight.

God, it sucks to be him just then. The only part of his body that isn't itching with burn is itchy for a whole other reason, and he can't scratch it.

"There something wrong with your throat?" Dean's practically in Sam's ear when he says it, presses a warm cloth over his eyes and puts Sam's hand over it to hold it in place.

"Huh?"

"Ahh, nothin'. Just if you keep swallowing like that, I'm really gonna start wondering what it is you're trying not to say." A soft snick, and Sam smells a hint of medicine in the air. He jumps when the first cool trail falls onto his shoulder.

"I'm..." And he swallows again. "I'm just a little freaked out, ya know? Cuz..." The gesture he makes toward his face catches in between Dean's shirt buttons on the way up. The t-shirt underneath is damp. Warm morning. He takes a second too long to pull his fingers free, rubs over the cloth on his face. "Cuz I can't see."

A dry laugh. "No, you're not. We've been here before. You know I got your back. Something else has you all wound up."

Sam tries to deny it by letting his head loll against the headrest and away from Dean. Like it makes his point to look away when he's already got his eyes closed.

"Look, Sam..." A warm hand smooths over the trail of cream on his shoulder, leaves a trail of goosebumps sprouting in its wake. "Sammy. You don't have to talk to me about whatever the fuck's on your mind, but you keep up the silent, whatever it is you've got going on, and I'm gonna tell you the story about the time when you were two and you went through that exhibitionist phase." A snicker and more rubbing up and down his arm.

Sam self-consciously jerks his arm up out of his lap, doesn't want Dean going any farther down, and pretends to adjust the cloth over his face. Dean makes a shrug Sam can hear.

"Suit yourself. So, anyway, you were like two. And I don't know if your Pampers were bunching or what, but you decided that you weren't having anything to do with them. You'd let Dad strap one on ya, and then we'd turn around and see you streaking across the yard displaying all the family jewels. Dad'd laugh and run after you screaming, 'don't look, Ethellll,' and you'd scream bloody murder the whole way back inside. Now, it was all fine and good until one day this dog showed up in our yard. Dad found your diaper lying in the middle of the kitchen floor, as usual, and looked out the back door. Saw that dog out there and made like lightning." Dean's voice has a soothing quality to it, like the medicine, rolls over Sam's skin like the cream, over his shoulder, his back, and Sam's tempted to just let him go on, wonders if he can get away with shivering and leaning closer.

"...So, Dad thought the dog was gonna eat you or something, but by the time he got out there, the dog was crouched down taking a dump, and you were just watching, circling all around and around like you were figuring something out. Before Dad could stop you, you squatted right..."

Oh, shit.

"Fine, okay. I'll talk. Just do NOT finish that story. What do you want me to talk about?" His voice cuts out on him as Dean's hand slides up over his shoulder to the back of his neck and along his collar bone. He will not swallow, will not swallow, will NOT swallow. Except he does. Dean reaches across to Sam's left thigh and turns him around so his feet are on the ground outside. Sam can't help the little whimper he makes when Dean's other hand slides up his neck to the back of his head and bends it forward so his head and the cloth over his eyes press into Dean's shoulder. Dean doesn't seem to notice, already applying cream to his back and right arm.

"I don't know. Seems like that brain of yours is always working over time on some pointless information. You could always translate that into dumbspeak. I been driving all night. Could use a nap."

Sam laughs, and that's a mistake, because his nose is pressed against Dean's throat, and Dean smells...well, he smells like stale sweat and medicine, which just makes Sam want to hold on for reasons he refuses to acknowledge. So, he laughs again. If his eyes weren't already glued shut, he's pretty sure this is the part where they'd be rolling back in his head. Between Dean's hands on his back, that sensitive little spot right between his shoulder blades, and the tickle of his longer hair against Sam's ear... ngh. He takes a breath, holds it, and starts to speak, no idea at all what will come out.

"I don't know what to say. This is bizarre, dark and hot, itchy. Kinda like those junior high boy-girl parties where they'd draw names out of a hat and throw you in the coat closet with some girl you never met."

Dean huffs. "I knew all those Saturday night tutoring sessions were a load of crap. You little horn dog."

"Yeah, well, it was what it was, for what it's worth between fourteen-year-olds."

Dean leans back suddenly, the cloth plopping onto the seat. "Wait a minute. When you were fourteen, we were living in Minnesota, and you were going to that parochial school of Pastor Jim's. You're gonna tell me you were feeling up sweet little girls in pigtails and Mary Janes?" Dean slaps the cloth back onto his shoulder, smacks Sam on the back of his head so it falls onto the rag. Sam adjusts it by nuzzling against it until it slides far enough up Dean's neck to be comfortable.

"Not really. Most of the time nothing much went on in there. We just waited 'til they opened the door."

"But what if she was hot? C'mon. I know you didn't let 'em all give you the slip."

Dean has moved his hands around to the front, smoothing cream over the peaks of Sam's chest. Sam laughs, ticklish, but he adds a snicker on the end, like it's the secret and not Dean's hands that make him bubble over.

"What? You were a smooth talker, were ya?"

"Let's just say, the whole thing about girls not being turned on by brains is a lie."

"Is it now?"

"Totally is. If there was a girl I really wanted to kiss, I always used the same line."

"You told 'em you were dyin', right? That always worked for me."

"No. Actually, I'd say something about how I read that there are neurons in the brain that help you locate your partner's lips in the dark. Then, they'd usually pretend not to believe me, and I'd prove 'em wrong."

Again, Dean sits back on his haunches and Sam pretends he can hear the shit-eating grin spreading across his face. "For real? So, like, you can find any chick's lips in the dark?"

"Maybe."

"Maybe. So sometimes you m..."

It could be cheating, waiting until Dean's talking to prove his point, but Sam figures the recently blinded are allowed to jump the gun a little. He doesn't miss, not completely. His top lip connects with the corner of Dean's mouth, and he drags himself to center, slow and with a long intake of breath that pulls Dean's bottom lip between his teeth. He holds it, breathing hard and more than aware that Dean's hand is back on his chest. Sure, it was thrown up partially in surprise and partially as a defensive gesture, but Dean's not going to let Sam fall out on his face. Fingers sliding up, still greased with the medicine, Dean's hand winds up behind Sam's neck, and still Sam breathes. It'd take just a thumb under his jaw to break Sam's grip, but Dean doesn't go there. His wrist stops bracing and falls down into the groove of Sam's collar bone.

This is the point where Sam would shut his eyes if they weren't already glued together at the lashes. Going with the feel, he drops in closer, tilts his head, and breathes in sharply as he lets go with his teeth. Dean follows with his chin, opens his mouth slightly, and Sam presses in, licking over both lips and then between, small little sips of Dean's breath and spit on the tip of his tongue.

His hands trace their way up Dean's arm to his shoulder, fingers wide as they move into his hair. Dean's shuddering under his touch, and Sam's torn between breaking the kiss with a Dean-like remark about who the chick is in this situation and pulling Dean up between his knees where he can get a better angle.

Except that's when he realizes. Dean's not shuddering. He's wheezing.

Sam breaks away so fast he can hear the stringers of spit stretch and snap. He doesn't know why he cringes. Probably his id telling him he deserves to have his ass kicked. Instead, Dean presses the cloth over each eye, wipes away the last of the glue, and pats him on the shoulder before standing.

"Guess it really does work," he says.

Sam opens his eyes in time to see Dean walk away.

TBC


	4. Chapter 4

**Part Three**

It's most likely mid-morning, judging by the thickness of the atmosphere and the evening rain still steaming off the pavement -ghost shadows of a sun they never see. A chain link fence appears on the edge of the horizon. Sam only recognizes it by the even spacing of the support poles, a steady pattern in the hazy blur between his eyelashes as he squints.

Sure, he can't really see for shit, but he keeps his lashes down and his head to the window. He's not protecting his eyes. Well, not _just _protecting his eyes. It's a little late for that.

There was a little boy once -a neighbor, a friend, maybe a relative, Sam can't really remember- who'd squint his eyes up tight every time he met someone new. His mother said he thought not seeing someone meant that someone couldn't see him either. Sam had dismissed it, then, but the tightness around his eyes, now, is only partially reflexive. He doesn't want Dean to see him.

They've seen each other every which way AND loose, part of growing up joined at the double helix. They've cleaned each other, clothed each other, analyzed various fluids (for diagnostic purposes, of course), and weathered adolescent storms that involved really bad hair and body odor. Now, things are different. Somehow. Sam's not sure what he looks like with scratches over his arms, his eyes trying to pus over with irritation. But it can't be pretty. At any rate, he doesn't feel pretty. And it matters.

He kissed his brother, on the mouth, with tongue. He should be laughing his ass off about now, calling bullshit with a slug to the shoulder and two for flinching. That's what brothers do. On television. In books. The old movies that had always flooded the airwaves after one a.m. What Wally and the Beav do. What Joey and Blossom do. (Hey, the chick had some balls.) And Greg and Peter might have put the moves on Marcia (or so Dean's inclined to believe) but not on each other. Brothers _don't_do that. Brothers who aren't them.

Sam's not laughing. Hell, he's not even sure he's sorry. Should he be?

He is sure he should not be thinking about doing it again.

If it weren't for the low quiver so deep in his gut he can't quite identify as either arousal or nausea, Sam would think the kiss was just a hallucination. This is the desert. Wouldn't be the first oasis to evaporate into mirage out here.

Dean hasn't mentioned a thing, not the kiss, and not whatever happened a couple nights ago at their Fourth of July bash. Since taking a couple hits off his inhaler and climbing back into the driver's seat, he hasn't stopped talking-about everything else EXCEPT what Sam's doing putting the moves on his brother. Everything.

And yeah, Sam really did not need to know he was potty-trained by a dog.

Sam hasn't stopped thinking, about the desert, how there's no sun, so there are no mirages. About the heat, because even here the air's never really dry enough to cool down overnight. About why the hell he put the moves on his brother, and why he's... He can't really pinpoint what it is he feels, other than frustrated.

Dean's going out of his way to prove to him that nothing's changed between them. Hell, Sam could confess to being Jeffrey Dahmer's pen pal and Dean would pretend it didn't matter. What they have is good. It's stable like nothing's ever been for them. It's comfortable. Of course Dean doesn't want it to change.

But Sam's... not sorry so much as disappointed. Granted, he hasn't really thought about what it is he's trying to accomplish, what it is he wants, but he knows 'more' is a pretty good start.

Maybe he _is_a selfish bastard, never satisfied, but otherwise there'd be no such thing as Heaven, no Nirvana, no Valhalla. Not if people were supposed to be content with... content, weren't supposed to strive for better and perfect and more.

He doesn't know how _much_more he wants. For now, he'll start with Dean telling him where the hell they're going, because that fence is approaching fast, stretches in either direction as far as he can see, and Dean hasn't even taken his foot off the accelerator. They're close enough now to make out the scratched outline of razor wire along the top, and that's pretty close given the fact Sam can't see much of anything without blinking almost in time to his heartbeat.

"Where are we, exactly?"

Dean leans over as far as he can without steering the car off the road. "I can't tell you. It's top secret."

That's a joke. Sam knows it's a joke, but he didn't laugh at the story about how he tried to drive the Impala like Daddy when he was three by sticking the car keys in a light socket (thank god for ground fault interrupts) and he's not laughing now. He feels less like laughing every minute. There's a patch of raw flesh on the inside of his left arm he can't stop scratching. His head's starting to think the most annoying sound in the world is thunk-a-thunk-a-thunk of tires over cracked asphalt. Every thunk-a is echoed by an answering thud behind his temples, and Dean was probably right about him trying too hard not to say what was on his mind, because his throat's grown sore around the knot of words in it.

"Cut that out before I strap cooking mitts on you!" Dean smacks him on the thigh hard enough to make him jump. And damn if Dean's hand on his thigh doesn't make_everything_jump.

"Then tell me where we are!" It sounds bitchy, even to him. People laugh sometimes to keep from crying, and not laughing _or_crying makes for one pissy Sam. He's not sorry for that either. He might also have entitlement issues to go with his selfishness. Hey, his friggin' skin is trying to slough off, Dean's not keeping up with his nebulizer treatment, because he's too busy driving, and Sam has a raging hard-on. Pissy doesn't begin to describe it.

"Home," Dean says without taking his eyes off the road or the approaching fence. "At least, it will be, until you heal up, maybe longer."

"Where?" He's more exasperated than he means to be. A little part of him cringes in shame and guilt at Dean's use of that four letter word they're not allowed to have, but it's a quiet little voice he's been trained to ignore.

"Actually, I got the idea from you."

"How so?"

"Katharine Heigl?" Dean looks over, puts a hand on the side of Sam's face, brushes over his cheek. "Eye booger," he shrugs. He doesn't drop his hand as quickly as he should. "Did you think I never watched the dubba-dubba-dubba-dubba dubba-dubba-dubba-u-B? The home of Katie Holmes and Michelle Williams? And let's not forget Michigan J. Frog, rockin' the top hat."

This time Sam pulls away from Dean, his head snapping to the window where he can now make out giant 'Restricted Area' signs on the fence. "Roswell?" Now, he's not so much exasperated as just plain skeptical.

"Not quite. Next logical step." Dean examines the hand he used to clean off Sam's face and rubs it over the thigh of his jeans before placing it back on the wheel. "Area 51." The car rumbles up to the fence, which looks to be 12 feet high if it's a foot, and coasts to a stop. Turning to face Sam, Dean smiles lopsidedly. "Welcome to Earth."

Dean's knowledge really does all come from television and movies. Sam groans. He has to admit, a Will Smith quote is oddly appropriate, since this really is the story all about how their lives got flipped, turned upside down...

Too bad the upside down view is just as scabby as right side up.

XXX

It takes Dean a good half an hour to get the gate open with bolt cutters from the trunk. He could probably cut a hole in the fence itself in half the time, but he chooses to take on the half dozen chains padlocked with latches the thickness of Sam's thumb. Wouldn't want to take the chance on scratching the Impala's paint driving her through a ragged hole in the chain link.

"You know, the front gate probably just had a guard tower and a barricade. We could just drive through," Sam points out as Dean stops for the third time to catch his breath, hands braced against his knees. Sam had offered to take a turn, but Dean (masochistic bastard) had made some comment about Sam cutting off a finger, and took on the task alone. Sam takes the opportunity to piss in the bushes and sits down on the hood of the car under the pretense of giving Dean shit, but Dean doesn't know he's got an extra inhaler in each pocket and his ears tuned to ultra-high wheeze frequency.

"Yeah. This road isn't even named on the map, so I'm guessing they didn't use it to access the base anymore."

"But?" Because there's always a 'but,' something that puts a Dean Winchester filter on the facts and makes every ludicrous idea seem perfectly logical.

"But the front gate's all the way on the other side of the lake, and I don't think we have enough gas to get there." He says it with a scratch to the back of his head, a sure tell there's a huge boogeyman lurking in the statement.

"Dean. Tell me we aren't in danger of running out of gas in the middle of the desert."

"Okay," Dean shrugs. "We're not in danger of running out of gas in the middle of the desert... so long as we get where we're going about five minutes ago. But hey, don't sweat it," he continues, hoisting the bolt cutters up off the ground. "From here, it's all downhill. Even if we run out of gas, we can coast into the main."

"And then?" Surely Sam's not the only one wondering how they leave without gas.

"C'mon, Sammy. It's a military base. Bound to be some gas inside. And this _is_Area 51. We could probably use some of that alien technology to beam in a whole oil tanker right out of the Gulf of Mexico."

Sam shakes his head, which is a bad idea, because 'ow' then crosses his arms over his chest. Another bad idea, since any touching skin starts to scrape like it's made of hay chaff. "You don't believe that alien crap, do you?"

"Nah," Dean huffs. He wipes a trail of sweat off his forehead, catches his breath before starting again on the lock he's working through. Bearing down, his face turns beet red, and the veins pop out on his forearms before the hasp finally snaps, and Dean almost collapses forward into the fence. He catches himself less than gracefully.

"So why here, then? Why not a Regency hotel somewhere?"

Dean pauses again, bracing against the long handles of the bolt cutters like a cane, all the while making a show of cocking a hip nonchalantly. Sam plays along, but he's not fooled. If there wasn't just one more lock on the fence, he'd take the damned cutters and open it himself. But for just one more, he'll spare Dean a little of his arrogant dignity. It's the least he can do after molesting him. "I've been thinking."

"That's never good."

Dean's sweating enough to glow even in the lack of sunlight. Sam can pretend not to be noticing, what with his own eyes barely at half-mast, but between the sweat, the reddened cheeks, and the shortness of breath, Sam can't help but think this is what Dean looks like after sex. "Very funny, Chief Runs in Rain Until Dick Falls Off," Dean chides. Sam wonders if that's an observation or a prediction, because... yikes. Dean huffs and goes on. "Actually, what I've been thinking is, we're going about this all wrong. Dad always said if you're lost in the woods, the best way to find help is to sit tight and let them come to you."

"We're not lost."

"No, but I'm not so sure we're alone either."

"What makes you say that?"

"Bottled water."

"What?" He passes Dean's archaic two word sentence off as shortness of breath.

Dean wipes the sweat off his face with the back of is arm and takes a seat beside Sam on the car, keeping both feet on the ground like he remembers what happened the last time they both tried to sit on the slippery metal. The car tips down with the added weight, and Sam catches a heel in the bumper to keep from sliding off again.

"We've been driving across this wasteland for months now, right?"

"Yeah, so?"

"Stopped in some of these places a good two or three times at least. And we take what we need, water, food, whatever. But we never take it all, you know, because we might be back again."

"What are you getting at?"

"Every time I take water off a shelf, I arrange the leftover bottles the same way. I figure, if anyone else comes along, they might not share our taste in Little Debbie, but they're gonna take water."

"That's good thinking." Sam wishes he'd thought of it. "What'd you find out?"

Dean shrugs. "Pretty much what I expected to find. Sometimes the bottles are exactly the way I left them, and sometimes there are bottles missing."

Sam slides forward on the hood so his feet touch ground, catches himself with his hands on the edge of the metal. "So, you think there are other people, and we just haven't met them yet."

"Pretty much." And there's no smirk, no cocky expression, or mental pat on the back in Dean's expression. Sam can only guess the number of sleepless nights Dean's spent thinking up that plan, desperate to know if anyone's left but them. He'd guess hundreds. He's spent at least that himself.

"But why didn't you just leave a note?"

Dean opens his mouth for a witty comeback that doesn't come, then he tips his head and rubs the back of his neck. "Heh. Probably the same reason I didn't think to mention it to you before now. Obviously, there were some holes in my plan."

"Speaking of..."

"What?"

"You know that fence could've been electrified. Probably should've tested it before you went all Jaws of Life on the lock."

"No electricity."

"Solar powered."

"No sun."

Sam chuckles to himself. "Yeah, we really ought to talk more."

"So..."

"So..."

"So, what does being here have to do with whether there's anyone out there besides us?"

Dean twitches one shoulder up, not even a real shrug, dismissing himself in a way he'd never dismiss Sam, then stands again, hoists the bolt cutters up. "I just thought it would be better to hang out in one place for awhile. And the military is bound to have stockpiles of everything we'd need."

"We drove right by Fort Hood."

"_You_ drove right by Fort Hood. I _rode_by it while you were all busy playing Superman." Now Sam actually laughs, small but audible. Dean was supposed to have been too out of it to notice Sam's cape and tights. "Anyway, this place is probably better. A Top Secret military base is bound to have all kinds of toys and goodies you can't get at GI's 'R Us. If there are people out there, then there's probably something here we can use to find 'em."

Sam doesn't even notice he's picking at a scab on his arm until Dean cuffs him upside the head.

"AFTER you stop shedding our skin, Godzilla."

Sam doesn't mean to fall off the car at that particular moment, but his head already hurt enough without Dean banging the gong on his ass. So, on his ass is exactly where he lands, tailbone throbbing, before he even realizes his knees start to wobble.

"Shit!" Dean catches him by the shoulder right before he tips forward and faceplants in the dirt. "Sam? Sammy?"

Sam blinks back tears that are more than irritation on his corneas, feels his head resist when he tries to meet Dean's gaze. Dean's hands on the side of his head help some to dampen the noise between his ears. "Ow."

"That's it," Dean says, though he doesn't stand up right away, a fact for which Sam is grateful, "back in the car with you."

"Just a minute." Sam bats at Dean's hands, because he doesn't need the blood rushing to his downstairs brain when his upstairs one is already starved. He closes his eyes and leans his head back against the grill, doesn't even think about the bugs stuck in it. The gravel crunches, door squeaks open then shut, and Dean comes back with a healthy dose of Tylenol and a bottle of water.

He feels Dean put a hand on the top of his head, one thumb extended down to his forehead and lifting up on first one eyelid then the other. His lips, what Sam glimpses of them, are all stretched tight and thin. It's a crime. Sam could totally make them plump up again if he didn't think his head would roll off in transit. Dean doesn't say what he's looking for, but Sam can tell he doesn't like what he finds. He might even press a little fumbling half-kiss onto the pad of Dean's thumb when Dean puts his palm over Sam's cheek. Dean says he used to suck his thumb when he was little, especially when he was sick with an ear infection or something else that just never stopped hurting no matter how much medicine they pumped into him. He's not above a little thumb sucking right now. Even if it is Dean's.

"You're getting hot."

"It's the desert." Now Sam laughs, and this time it's just to keep from crying. Dean's not allowed to look that close to tears.

"Whatever, smartass. You sit here until I finish the fence, and then we'll get inside."

Sam takes a drink of water and gives a thumbs up. "Aye, aye, Captain."

"Fuck you."

"Okay."

"You're sick, Sam." And right then, he is, so he's not offended in the least. Still not sorry either.

XXX

Two days after Dean almost died on the floor of that motel room in Texas, Sam feels like they've just managed to slide the death card across the table from one hand to the next like the dreaded Old Maid. Dean's all hands and an endless stream of dialogue that goes nowhere, because Sam only answers in whimpers and groans. His head hasn't stopped pounding, yet, and now his back's taken up counterpoint against the cinderblock.

"Can you help me out here, Sam?" Dean's hands steady his head, then fall away, and Sam's head follows. "Whoa, c'mon. C'mon, Sammy just hang with me for a few minutes." Sam doesn't want to. He wants to sleep, better yet, crawl under this friggin' cot and die, just wants to curl inward on himself like a silverfish rolling away from a hungry scorpion.

Everything hurts. What doesn't throb, itches, and he can't scratch, not with his hands wrapped in gauze and duct tape (masking tape tasted like shit, but that hadn't stopped him from chewing through it, and he really doesn't want to know what papier mache tastes like).

"Fine," Dean huffs, as Sam's head falls onto his shoulder. "But don't think I'm not gonna give you shit about this when you're better." He does some weird, stretching, twisting thing that makes his tendons cord under Sam's forehead, and there's a metallic scrape like something being removed from a stainless steel bowl. Then, Sam can see, just a sliver of light pushed over his eye by the pad of Dean's thumb, and between the haze of whatever infection's bubbling over the surface, he can just make out the fringe of Dean's bangs. He blows them away as if they were his own, force of habit mostly, and more effort than he'd care to make again. He catches a glimpse of Dean's other thumb right before it presses against his eye. His open eye.

"Hey!" He couldn't possibly sound any whinier. "What the..." He jerks back, but Dean's got his fingers spread over the side of his face and goes along with him. Sam almost summons the effort to shake him off, because, hello, you can poke your friends and you can poke your eyes but you can't poke your friends' eyes...uh..., yeah, that ain't right. Before he gets over the initial shock, something cool soothes outward from the warm press of Dean's thumb, and Sam stops fighting. "What is that?"

"You don't want to know."

"Smells like... Dude, you put slime in my eye?"

"Yeah, well, I figured it couldn't hurt. Stuff's like aloe or something. It's worked on everything else we've used it for. Burns, cuts, lube..." He clears his throat, "...for like squeaky door hinges."

"Couldn't hurt? Dean, you're putting it in my eye. How do you know it won't blind me?"

"It won't."

"How do you know?"

"Well, you see, I went out to the airstrip and rounded me up about twenty jackrabbits, then held them down while I smeared gunk in their eyes."

"There aren't any rabbits."

"Oh, well, then, I went down to the lab and got me one of those aliens..."

"Dean..." He's too tired to even sound pissy. "You didn't test it on yourself."

"Just call me Subject Zero. Consider my debt to humanity paid."

"What if it had blinded you?"

"Don't worry, Sam, I thought of that. Only put it in one eye."

"Great, so now you're sticking fingers in my face with bad depth perception."

"C'mon. Give a guy a little credit, would you? I'm trying to help. You and your grabby hands couldn't keep from scratching, and now you've got yourself a nice scrape on your eye." Dean puts some goop in his other eye and reaches for the gauze. "Lights out for now, can't have you squinting and making it worse."

Sam's not too proud to whimper, but he's asleep by the time Dean finishes tying the bandages.

XXX

The next time Sam wakes up, he really wishes he hadn't. The part of him not silently screaming and thrashing under the constant firing of pain receptors in his brain that seem hotwired into a lightning storm forces him to stay perfectly still and not add any new sensation to the mix.

Dean's still talking. Sam wonders if he's ever left his side or stopped rambling on.

"And that special alien metal they claimed was just the remains of a weather balloon? Well, that's real, too. They've got sheets and sheets of it rolled up like cloth on these big spools in the next hangar. You should see it, Sam. It's so shiny, it's almost like it doesn't just reflect the light, but actually multiplies it somehow. You know, like maybe the metal was actually part of what powered the ship..." A soft chuckle. "Would you listen to me, talking about aliens and spaceships... I dunno," and Sam can hear the scrape of Dean's fingers over the back of his own head, "guess I thought we'd really seen everything."

Sam's sure there's a wise crack in him, but it's lost in hurt, hurt, hurt, writhing and perfectly still. His breath hitches, uneven and trembling, screams he won't voice, cries he won't utter, but God, when will it stop?

Dean must hear the change in his breathing. The cot sinks down beside him, and the shift breaks Sam's paralysis for a second, just enough to roll onto his side and curl inward, around Dean like he's a giant heating pad on a pulled muscle.

Dean doesn't stop talking, but his voice gets quieter when Sam nuzzles into his hip. His hand falters a little but goes down between Sam's shoulder blades, a rub that's supposed to bring comfort. A fire ignites under his fingers, though, and Sam arches away, his knees drawing up tighter, practically into Dean's lap.

"Sorry. Shhh," Dean whispers. His hand doesn't hesitate a second time, winds up into Sam's hair instead, one thumb stroking over the top of his ear. It feels...good. It's the only thing that feels good, that doesn't burn, throb, or scream to be scratched. It dampens the thrum behind his temples some, and travels through his veins like medicine, something opiate and calming.

Dean's silent for a few breaths, and Sam nuzzles in closer, wants more, addicted already to warm and safe.

"And..." Dean clears his throat. "Anyway, that metal fabric, it's just as tough as they said on all those alien conspiracy shows you made me watch. I'm sure they must've made a cutting tool for it or something, but I haven't been able to find it, yet. Don't really need one, though. Turns out a knife that can kill a demon can also cut alien metal. Who knows, maybe they came from the same dimension or something." A soft huff of a laugh. "You should've seen me trying to cut off a piece. I tried everything, tin snips, arc welder, cutting torch, and eventually I just did a Dad. You remember how he used to get when he was trying to fix something and it wouldn't work no matter what he did? How he just started whaling on it with whatever he had handy. Guess he figured, at least if it was broken beyond repair, he could justify spending the money for a new one, ya know?"

Dean's voice is low, vibrating down through his skin, and soothing, way better than fingers for scratching. Sam can't curl any tighter without grinding his hips against Dean, but he does anyway, and doesn't try to muffle the whimper that starts in his groin and muscles its way out his throat. God, how can that feel so good when everything else burns and cringes, tight and away? He grinds again, just to see if it feels the same, whimpers louder, because, yes. Better.

"Sam?" Dean's tight against him, doesn't pull away but sits up straighter so there's more gap between them, no softness. Sam can't feign sleep, but he's still too far under, sickness as good as alcohol for removing qualms.

Sam slides a hand up onto Dean's thigh, just above his knee, feels Dean's muscle jump when his fingers clench into the fabric of his jeans. He doesn't know why, but he opens his mouth, teeth scrape against denim until he gets a hold, and bites down, because, fuck, he can't take this, and he can't scream. Can't ask, just whimpers again and grinds his hips against Dean's lower back.

If it was a bullet, a knife in his back, anything else but this blanket of ache and need, he knows Dean would fix it.

Dean's breath hitches along with Sam's hips, and his fingers in Sam's hair tremble somewhere between petting and grabbing hold. Sam can hear the thick in his throat and the quiver in his voice when he swallows and says, "Sa-Sam..."

It's probably not fair, but Sam knows the answer to that question, lets go the jeans between his teeth, little stringer of spit dragging over his lip, and huffs, "Dean, please." Not really sure what he's asking for, he can tell Dean doesn't know how to comply, but there's a softening, a sinking together so all of Sam is touching some of Dean. Even that's not enough.

Dean takes a long, slow breath in and out that fills all the way down to his waist and empties into the void of the room Sam's never really seen, only recognizes by the echo on the tile floor and the cool scrape of the wall behind his cot.

Dean... clears his throat and starts talking again. "So, you know I was thinking. As shiny as that metal is..."

Sam's fingers claw into Dean's knee as Dean starts to shift away, something closer to a sob than he'd like to admit scraping from his throat. Dean doesn't slow, not his voice, not his movement, but just when Sam thinks he's going to leave, Dean slides around behind him, one hand on Sam's hip, breath hot in his ear and slow, steady, deliberate. For some reason, Dean pressed up behind him doesn't burn the way just his hand between his shoulder blades had burned. This is good. Nice.

Even though he asked, practically begged, Sam still hisses when Dean's hand slides down his hip along his bare stomach, and under the waistband of his shorts. When his fingers start stroking, palm flexing, Dean's voice stays calm, even, but Sam can't hear what he's saying anymore, his own breath rasping into the crook of his arm. The mattress is thin, the spring more of a coiled frame than cushion, and there's no headboard or footboard, no sound of anything like sex as his hips start to flex.

Dean's tugs speed up to match Sam's thrusts, but his voice doesn't change, or his breath against Sam's neck. When Sam comes, a strangled groan into his teeth with a hiss, he's sure Dean chokes a little, swallows back on something Sam can't think about.

Dean slides his hand out, wipes it on Sam's underwear, and starts to turn away, but Sam turns with the hand as it goes, ends up with his forehead pressed into Dean's chest. "Don't."

Dean doesn't go, but his breath starts to huff, a sound Sam recognizes as frustration. "Dammit, Sam..." Sam presses further into Dean's chest, hooks an ankle around where their feet brush together. He's not letting go. "...been too fucking long."

Huh?

Sam misses the meaning for a second, until, instead of pulling away, Dean presses in closer, and either Sam got him the wrong jeans again, or he's hard. Sam's too dazed to be surprised, but that doesn't stop him from fumbling stupidly with his hands, uncertain and clumsy. He's all elbows and thumbs, can't seem to do more than hold Dean at the waist and stroke up under his t-shirt, everything slow-motion and heavy.

Dean doesn't wait for him to figure out what he's doing, undoes his zipper and slides on in. Sam feels a little useless and stupid until Dean's breath stutters against his throat, evens out gradually as he pulls Sam closer across his chest. Closer is more, and for now, enough.

XXX

Things get worse and better at the same time, criss-crossing back and forth, brief moments of together, right before their angular momentum propels them in different directions. Infection festers, delirium to rival the fog of steam that chased them out of Hell. Dean doesn't stop talking. Ever. If he sleeps, he talks _in_his sleep, his words sluicing out a floodgate, half nostalgia and half promise.

Dean taught Sam to ride a bike, but only after Sam insisted on riding to school with his training wheels still on. He always knew Dean beat up that kid who made fun of him on the way home. For some reason, Dean picks now to confess as much. Maybe he's not confessing, just reminding, a poke in the ribs to say, 'remember when we were brothers.'

Sam does remember.

But even sick and festering with infection, he likes this better.

It's more.

Funny how the horizon always rises, no such thing as an easy downhill coast toward anything worthwhile.

XXX

Dean's been saying for days the bandages on Sam's eyes are ready to come off, but he still puts them on. He takes extra care not to tie Sam's hair in the knot but pulls it tight nonetheless... right before he leans in for a kiss. _Dean_leans in for a kiss. Finally, finally, fucking finally, and something loosens in Sam's chest.

They break too abruptly for coherent thought to catch up with Dean's running mouth, and he whispers, "Don't you ever scare me like that again." Finally, what he really means.

"Fucking hypocrite." Two can play that.

Sam's hands might be soft from being wrapped and tucked away, but they're not clumsy or stupid. When Dean comes, Sam's hand and all its new pink skin is in his shorts, and Dean's breath gasps hot over Sam's tongue, no words from the past or for the future, just now in syncopated, hot rhythm.

The bandages start to slip from his eyes and unravel against Sam's cheek. He arches back and pulls them away, his eyes fluttering open for just a second. Dean's eyelashes sweep in wispy, dark shadow over pinked cheeks, a softness over his forehead Sam hasn't seen for…ever.

It's gorgeous and perfect, makes Sam's throat convulse around something rising out of his chest with jackhammer steps, until Dean opens his eyes and sees Sam looking back.

Dean's hum breaks off, just a choke in his throat tightening into a wheeze, and he falls back on his haunches, his face red with something other than desire. No amount of soothing touches, Sam's thumbs over the ridge of Dean's cheek, over his lips, can stop the exchange that follows in silence.

Dean swallows hard, chokes enough to hitch his chest. _Can't do this._ _It's wrong_.

Fingers curl over the ridge of Dean's ear, heels of hands solid against his jaw. _Says who?_

Dean pulls at Sam's wrists, eyes ducking away before he slides out of reach. _Everyone_.

Sam stands, jaw set. _This half of everyone doesn't see it that way_. It'd be more convincing if his shorts weren't bulging and damp.

_This one does_. Dean stands but doesn't look in Sam's eyes before leaving.

XXX

Sam does his own bandages and ointments after that. He does a lot of things alone after that, doesn't have much choice. Dean sneaks out of their room- a mechanic's apartment at the back of the main hangar- every morning, spends his days putzing around the base. It's nothing like it was portrayed in _Independence Day_. If there are huge labs and spaceships, then they're probably underground, and it's doubtful they'd run on the gas generator anyway. Dean says he's found that strange metal they'd claimed to be weather balloon wreckage, so Sam figures what top secrets they do have are locked away here like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of _Raiders of the Lost Ark_, and the research was farmed out to secret labs in other places who didn't really know what they had.

Dean seems intrigued by something, driven, keeps looking up toward the massive skylight above the hangar like he expects it to fall in on them. He scrambles through his days without even the deluge of one-sided banter he'd been spraying while Sam was sick, and Sam? Well he's not sure Dean's ready to hear anything he has to say, hopes the distraction of Dean's work, whatever it is, will help put things in perspective.

Sam doesn't really get what Dean's up to, but then, he hadn't known Dean was capable of building an EMF detector until he'd pulled it out, and he'd built the solar wind goggles practically right under Sam's nose. He figures whatever Dean's up to, it's probably huge. Sam had his Stanford. (They've been there once since the world ended, to stock up on Mac and Cheese and Ramen, or so Dean claimed. It's amazing how useless most of the library is, now. Government, Law, Sociology…none of that will be useful for generations, providing there actually are other people out there, and most of it's likely wrong if the whole, end of the world thing is any hint. All in all, the hallowed halls were mostly hollow in this context.) So, let Dean have his secret government facility. Hard science seems to be where the action's at. Social sciences will have to take a back seat.

Sam hates the back seat.

If Sam goes looking and happens to find his brother at work, a far-off, thoughtful haze over his features, Dean doesn't let on what he's thinking. If he speaks at all, it's about when they were kids, the things he and Dad had built together, salvaged from old junk. Sam lets him talk, feels a little like he's sitting in Pastor Jim's sanctuary taking in a sermon on the tenth commandment while eyeing the collection plate. They never talked then. It seems a little like sacrilege to talk about that stuff, now. Sam's trying to move forward, and Dean's falling back. Sam's not really sure what he's supposed to say. Dean never asks for his input, anyway, probably talks to himself when Sam isn't there.

Most days, he leaves Dean lunch- a stick of hang-down sausage from the massive pantry, a Meal Ready to Eat, if he's pissed, or peanut butter and soda crackers. Most days it's sausage and cheese, and Sam even trims off the mold. He can't stay mad at Dean for pulling the_dirtywrongbad_card, considering Dean probably got it when Sam sent him fishing for queens. No wonder Sam never won at Go Fish.

Most of the MRE's, Sam eats himself, each bite a slow, arduous study in how he managed to fuck everything up.

XXX  
>Sam's entire being seems to lurch in the general direction of Dean in a way that's harder to ignore than any itch. It drives him mad with restlessness, but not mad enough to force the issue.<p>

What he needs is a project of his own, something to while away the hours when he's most definitely not waiting for Dean- a cover story, complete with bikini inspector badge and a cheap suit.

Mr. Clean, he's not, but poking through back rooms and abandoned offices is a good way to sort out what options they have, assess the situation from every angle. And it gives him something to do that doesn't include slamming Dean against a wall.

He's only pretending to look for mold. Funny how searching and finding seem to go hand in hand.

He should've looked for puppies instead.

The entire wall of the generator room and the intake for the central heat and air unit are covered in it. This place wasn't built to withstand the daily downpours. The foundation's cracked, and the roof is sagging where rain seeped into the ductwork, giving the mold a place to take hold, thick as soot and twice as noxious.

Dean, in typical Dean fashion, refuses to acknowledge the risk he's taking by staying. He used to throw himself in front of bullets and flying couches. Now, he stands against the falling sky and the rot beneath it.

"You mind telling me what the hell you think you're doing?" Dean asks.

"Packing." He says it while looking over Dean's shoulder like he can see the enemy approach, feels the need to reach for the gun in his waistband that hasn't been there for months.

Dean kicks through the pile of items Sam's chucked out of the trunk, things he'd stowed away himself a couple of lifetimes ago. "Kinda going about it ass backwards, don't you think?"

"We need more room for supplies. I-I think maybe we should head…north. Canada… Maybe farther." Sam shouldn't feel like he needs to duck his eyes away, but he does, suddenly embarrassed.

"You hate snow."

"It's not safe here. Too wet." He knows better than to panic, knows a level head can reason through just about anything, but his head's been off kilter since Dean developed the ability to turn blue at the drop of a hat.

"Just as wet there, only colder. We're doing fine right where we are." He won't leave.

So, Sam has a project now, too. Make sure they stay fine as long as they're here. He can do that. He hopes.

It's not easy beating back a colony of microbes that spreads through the air and water. It appears overnight in places that were clean yesterday, just the tiny mushroom tops sprouting over a fairy ring the size of Texas. It's a losing battle from the start.

But the good fight's not over just yet. There's something to be said for being on a military base. Sam imagines the Merry Maids never had flame throwers at their disposal and didn't have a clue how to turn over a jet engine in order to stir up a cleansing breeze. But the sheer vastness of the hangar wasn't designed to be climate controlled. Sam wages a valiant war while Dean squirrels away the hours in his makeshift lab, but it's like holding back a glacier with snow fence or throwing Dixie cups full of water at a dragon.

Little by little he surrenders more of their territory. They're down to just the lab, their apartment, and the half dozen offices between them along with the main hangar. The rest of the barracks is a toxic wasteland. He wears cover alls he keeps in garbage bags when he leaves the safe zone for supplies, and anything he brings back out of the pantry is triple washed before he opens the can. Still, Dean comes in every night wheezing, thinks Sam doesn't know the nebulizer is still plugged into the cigarette lighter in the car. And Dean doesn't know Sam's robbed half the airplanes in the hangar of their oxygen tanks and masks and has them stashed within a hundred feet of each other in every possible direction.

You'd think they were preparing for the end of the world.

XXX

Dean's been spending time on the roof, of all places, comes back with lines around his hands that make Sam think of Ben Franklin and his key. He'd worry if the lightning wasn't so predictable. All the months of surviving in this new climate, and he can count on one hand the number of freak storms that've blown up in the middle of the day. Sam leaves Dean to whatever finger mangling project he's got going up there, waits with bandages and antiseptic in tow.

Dean doesn't complain or protest when Sam dresses the cuts, but doesn't ask for help either. Sam takes him by the wrist, and he goes along with a sigh, like he doesn't have time for the distraction, looks through his pages of drawings and notes the whole time, not once meeting Sam's gaze. The extra care Sam takes to trim away the bulk so Dean can still use his bandaged fingers, the little rub of his thumb over the back of Dean's hand before he lets it fall, go unnoticed. Not so much as a blush.

Sam feels like the invisible man. He hasn't been able to look Dean in the eye since his bandages came off. Sometimes he looks away first. Sometimes Dean does, but glances in each other's vicinity are merely navigational, it seems, keeping them from bumping into each other, or stepping on toes. They don't look to or for each other anymore, not while the other might be looking back. They mostly circle like magnets trying to come together from the wrong direction. In every way that matters, Dean's that little boy with his eyes scrunched, refusing to see or be seen.

So, when Sam hears him call down the stairs, his voice urgent and half an octave above commanding, he takes the steps three at a time.

The door's ancient and usually sticks, groaning open an inch at a time even with a shoulder pressed into it. This time, Sam nearly loses a fingernail when he presses on the lever and it's ripped free of his grip, clangs against the side of the building hard enough to crumble the brickwork. Throwing an arm up to shield his eyes from the stinging lash of his own hair and a swirling cloud of coarse sand, Sam barely makes out the hunched outline of his brother on the far side of the roof, too close to the edge for Sam.

"Dean!"

"Sam! A hand over here!" His voice is ripped away in gasps, Sam catching it on a backdraft, out of sync with Dean's mouth.

As he approaches, Dean gives a heave, and Sam catches the glint of wire stretching into the sky, Dean's arms reaching up behind it, his hands dripping blood. Leave it to Dean to use wire instead of string. The line's lashed around the flag pole at least twice, from what Sam can tell, and still drags Dean closer to the edge of the roof. A shank of PVC pipe bangs up against Sam's shins, most likely the reel upon which the wire is supposed to be wound. Dean has the now-loose end wrapped around his bare hands, his face a strained reflection of his entire trembling body.

By the time Sam makes it to his side, battling against the prevailing wind, Dean's ghastly pale, his jaw clenched, eyes focused on his hands. With his palms wrapped in the sleeves of his jacket, Sam reaches an arm on each side of his brother, trapping the line against flag pole to take some of the strain off Dean.

"Let! Go!" He has to yell each word separately into the tempest, taking all his breath just to make his own ears hear. It leaves him panting, his chest heaving against Dean's back.

"No!" The word's lost, but the shape of Dean's mouth and the shake of his head are clear. "N-" Dean gasps, twists his head to the side, forehead against his shoulder. "Need it!" Thunder crashes, the abrupt clap of a cloud-to-ground strike. It's hard to tell where the vibration of it ends and the pounding of their hearts against Dean's back begins.

_Fuck, Dean._Not even words, just a tensing in his shoulders irritated clench of his chin.

So much for predictable weather patterns.

He slides his hands farther up the pole, pins the wire with his right and jerks an inch of slack above that with his left, creeps a little higher and repeats the process, feeding the slack down the line until Dean can get a half-hitch around the tie-off. It takes another several minutes of tugging and reaching before Sam can get a second hitch, shadows shifting as lightning crawls along the belly of the sky. Then, releasing one finger at a time, he lets the tie-off take the wire and fumbles at the wraps on Dean's hands, the process made slow by the slick of blood.

The first splooshes of heavy raindrops splat against the steel door as Sam and Dean duck inside the stairwell. They don't pause to close it behind them. It's not worth the risk. Instead they stagger down the hallway and close the fire door behind them.

XXX

They're still gasping and swaying on their feet when they collapse through the doorway into their apartment.

"What the fuck was so important about that thing that it's worth losing your hands or getting struck by lightning?" Sam tosses three perfectly good but nearly threadbare towels to the floor, takes out the thickest. He's still seething enough that he doesn't feel the crack of his kneecaps on the concrete between Dean's feet when he falls at the side of the bed and wraps both his brother's hands, the towel turning red in a matter of seconds.

"Took me weeks to get it high enough to do any good."

Sam grimaces as he peels the towel back, starts to pour saline over the cuts in order to see them better. He doesn't like what he sees. "Spoken like a true scientist. I'm sure the Curie's would be proud."

"Sam, I…" He coughs, catching his breath more slowly than Sam.

"Forget it. I don't want to hear it, Dean. I've heard it before. The big picture, saving people, blah, blah. You wanna save the world, and you don't give a shit about yourself. It's noble. You're a real fucking hero. Freedoooom." He tosses a gob of pink gauze into the plastic tub he keeps on hand with all their first aid supplies in easy reach. The cuts are deep, a few nearly to the bone, but far as he can tell, nothing but skin and muscle damage. He can fix that. This time. Dean hisses as he dabs at the deepest one with an alcohol-soaked cotton ball, and despite himself, Sam says, "Sorry."

Dean doesn't argue, seems focused on something distant. That far-off gaze Sam's come to hate just a little clouds his eyes. Sam doesn't have the energy to still the shaking in his hands and stay mad, too. He's tired, of waiting, of hoping, giving space and never making any headway. There just aren't words for how futile it all seems just then.

But just lately, Dean always has words.

"Do you remember the kite you had when you were ten?" Dean asks, and without looking, Sam feels Dean's eyes on the top of his head. He wonders why Dean picks now to see him, but he doesn't look up himself. There's the little matter of wounds that need stitching, and not all of them are Dean's.

Sam huffs, makes a show of blowing the bangs out of his eyes. He can't tell if Dean's actually asking or if he's just fallen back into his weeks old routine of talking about things Sam barely remembers. He's not sure he's really supposed to answer. So far, it's been just Dean, talking over Sam like the soundtrack from their old life can make this one less real. "Yeah. I remember." Talking seems a good way to get his breath under control, helps the shaking a little. "It cost two bucks from the dime store down the street and had a picture of Superman on it."

Dean nods, without a smile. "It was April- Kite-flying month. Your science class did a unit on aerodynamics and how the tails on a kite worked. At the end of it, your whole class had a kite-flying day in the park. You showed up with your two dollar plastic and popsicle stick wonder, and the rest of your class showed up with hobby store mock-ups that had two reels of string and tails as long as school buses. You were so embarrassed. I remember you tried to sneak off into the woods."

Sam laughs, more real this time than the last, pauses, needle in hand, and drops his chin to his chest, which seems to be the best posture for remembering. "You chased me down and said you spent our last two dollars on that hunk of junk, and if I didn't get my ungrateful ass out there and have some fun with it, you were going to tell everyone I was peeing in the bushes."

There's a hint of the old Dean in there, a crooked weakling of a smirk but a twinkle in his eye that doesn't need sunlight to emulate. "When we came out, all those other kites were just a tangled knot with a dozen crying kids on the ends of it."

Sam bites his lip, his head nod just a slow bob atop his slouched shoulders. "Wasn't enough wind to fly milkweed fluff that day. Ours was the only kite that made it high enough to catch a breeze, and you had to run like a racehorse to get that. Everyone else was so jealous." He looks up, now, remembers how Dean had seemed ten feet tall that day. Not even knee-high to the Dean sitting here now.

"You were so proud." Dean smiles, the first genuine emotion, Sam's seen from him in days. "We were a good team."

"We still are."

"Yeah." The smile softens and falls, "But would you still be proud? If people saw us..." The 's' is missing, cut off momentarily before Dean clears his throat. Sam waits, his eyes on the frayed hem of Dean's pant leg. "If people saw us _together_, what would they think?"

He doesn't have the luxury of planning what he'll say next. Dean will never believe him if he hesitates. "The same thing they thought then- that I'm the luckiest kid they know." Coughing into his shoulder, Sam looks back down at the needle in his hand, notices the shaking has stopped. "Only taller."

The quivering's internalized, a panicky, awkward tickle of afraid and hopeful trying to mesh wavelengths between them. The feedback whine's not audible, but it's as impossible to overcome as trying to push two magnets together, north to north.

Finally, finally, after all Sam's waiting and backing away, Dean has enough room to flip. Before Sam can start the next stitch, Dean's fingers curl around his wrist, his thumbs stroking along the backs of Sam's hands. "Well, okay, then," he says.

Sam can't look up, so afraid he misunderstands.

It's a good thing brains are hard-wired for kissing in the dark.

XXX

It's not easy. If Sam had one word for Dean, he supposes it'd be restless. Dean's always moving- up at dawn, to the lab, lunch with Sam, sex with Sam, up to the roof, after-dinner talk, always about the past, and never about the future. Wouldn't want to jinx it. Then it's bed, again, and Sam. Sex splinters them apart, laminates them back together, stronger but still striated, grains of Sam and grains of Dean, under each other's nails in the bleeding quick.

"Where you goin'?"

"I have work to do, Sam."

"Work."

"Yeah, well this world ain't saving itself."

"This Dean either."

"Sam..." He leaves his boots untied, the necks gaping open, and heads for the door. "C'mon, don't get all broody on me. Just... I can't drop everything I'm doing because something else comes up." Sometimes the biggest step in the right direction is the step back. "Yeah." Sam drops back onto his pillow, one arm over his eyes. "You want me to bring you lunch?"

"I got plenty in the mini fridge." He opens the door, adds without turning, "Got enough for you, too," and shuts it behind him.

Sam sighs but doesn't let it linger. Rome wasn't built in a day, and the Great Barrier Winchester won't come down any faster.

But it will fall. Hopefully before they kill each other.

XXX

The first hint of a draft across his bare chest, and Sam bolts up, already missing Dean.

The only things that seem to help keep the mold at bay are moving air and fire. Fire creates smoke, which is almost as hard on Dean as the mold, but a constant supply of heated, drying wind is their strongest ally. There shouldn't be a chill in the air. Ever. A draft is like a starter pistol for every adrenaline pump in his body.

He's heard of soldiers sleeping in the trenches with their eyes half open, of the walking dead so strung out on adrenaline and nerves they keep walking and talking long after their heart's stopped feeding their brains. A lifetime of hunting, and it takes germ warfare to get him to the same point of unblinking hyperawareness.

Sam reaches for the switch on the torpedo-shaped shop heater they put in where the second bed used to go before he realizes it's still running.

It hasn't kicked out. Dean has.

It's nothing new for Dean to sneak out before Sam pries his eyelids open, but he's pretty sure it's still the middle of the night. Even Dean usually sleeps more than four hours. The sweat pooling in the hollows of Sam's chest from sleeping in the bone dry oven he's turned their apartment into chills to ice water as he lurches around.

The moment of panic twists into confusion. Where the hell can Dean be? Sam can _hear_him for Christ's sake. His neck's twisted about as far around as it can go with his arm knotted in the bed sheet that's supposed to be Dean, when his eyes catch the flicker of light from the two-way radio on the nightstand. Dean's got his keyed on the other end like a baby monitor so Sam can hear him breathing. Of course, he'll pretend it's an accident, just like he always does. The laugh that burps out in response is as much relief as it is exasperation.

Jerking his arm free, he hits the keyed mike alarm, knows the other radio will emit a tone to let Dean know he wants to speak, then waits a second for the speaker to go dead before he says, "Fuck, Dean. Now?"

The radio crackles with static as Sam falls back on his pillow. "Inspiration strikes when it strikes, little brother." A pause followed by more static. "Tried not to wake you."

"I'd actually sleep better if you _would_wake me."

"Aww…" static. "You're not afraid of the dark are you?"

"Only when you're out in it."

"Sam…" For a second, Sam can hear the endearment on the tip of Dean's tongue, something sweet and consoling and maybe romantic (cuz yeah, he's starting to think he really_is_that gay)…completely un-Dean. Instead there's more static, a breath and a low hiss, because Dean keeps his mike keyed while he thinks of something else. "What can I say? I do my best work at night."

"I won't argue with that." He keeps the smirk out of his voice to an extent, but not altogether.

"Of course not. You'd lose." The timbre of that is less snarky than Sam would like, but he wasn't expecting a response at all, so he takes what he can get.

What they do, now that they're together, even without the blindfold is still mostly making out in the dark. It's a whole lot of fumbling, slippery and new, straining taut muscles without all the softness of a woman's curves. There's still teeth where there shouldn't be, cut lips and bruised confidence, like learning to ride a bike or change a tire, only with fireworks and rumpled bedclothes. At least Dean doesn't go back to his own bed anymore. That might have something to do with the fact that Sam tossed it out to make room for the heater, but Dean's never complained. Things are good between them, just still a near secret they don't talk about. Sam's working on that, too.

"You in the lab?" What he wants to say is, 'you better not be on the roof.' He knows Dean's itching to get back up there, but the storm flooded the whole hallway and the offices along it. Sam won't let him go through there until it's thoroughly cleaned. It's a long process. He hasn't bothered mentioning the fact that there are gas masks and oxygen tanks all over this place. Dean's hands are barely starting to heal. If his kite didn't blow away in the storm, it's not going anywhere anytime soon.

Sam tries to imagine what Dean's doing on the other side of the static, what it is setting the rhythm of this conversation as there's another hiss and more static. The reception's not usually this bad.

"The car."

"Oh." Dean still takes his nebulizer treatments in the car. Sam isn't supposed to know. But it makes sense, now, the static over the radio as mist from the nebulizer hose hits the microphone. "You okay?"

There's a rustle of paper over the speaker before Dean answers. "Peachy." Sam smiles into the darkness imagining Dean writing in the little notebook he's started carrying. Sometimes he stops mid-sentence, jerks it out, and starts writing, which would be annoying if it wasn't so friggin' hot.

"Whatcha writing?" He always asks, never gets a straight answer, but the banter is like the solid center of the boat that doesn't rock, just bobs up and down, slow and easy.

"Living will. Cuz, ya know, modern medicine being what it is, I wouldn't want to end up on life support with you waiting on my comatose ass." There's an exaggerated scrape of graphite over paper, and he says, "Scratch that. I, Dean Winchester, being of sound mind and smoking hot body, want nothing more from my life than to have my brother, Sam Winchester, wait on me hand and foot. I'm tired. Bring on the coma."

That would be funnier if Dean didn't actually sound exhausted. Sam's pretty sure he hardly sleeps at all, can tell he's on the verge of something, either a breakthrough or a collapse, and all Sam can do is be ready. It's too much for just the two of them, and their days here are numbered. Unless they get some help.

"Turn on the radio." Sam thinks now's a good time to let Dean in on a little secret.

"What?"

"Sam, I don't have that Peter Gabriel song," wheeze, a hiss, and static, "and even if I did, your eyes are bloodshot, so not worth singing about."

"Not the tape deck," Sam clarifies, his arm flung over his eyes as he kicks away the sheet around his ankles. "Turn on the radio. It's a surprise."

"A surprise, huh? Last time you said you had a surprise for me, you stuck your tongue in my…" hiss and more static.

"Just do it. Center of the dial."

"Yes, sir, Air Jordan, sir."

The radio falls dead, just the green light glowing in the darkness as Sam waits for a response while rolling his bottom lip back and forth between his teeth. Dean actually _sounds_surprised when he comes back. "Is that…?" Surprised and a little something Sam can't quite pin down. Hopeful, maybe?

"Yeah. It is. I was cleaning some offices, found a shortwave radio in one of the control rooms. Thought it was worth a try. I'm broadcasting over three different stations on the center of the dial. Same message, over and over. I figure, if anyone's listening…"

"Sam… that's…wow."

Sam knows what Dean's trying to say. He's been there, too, trading hands on the dial searching for something, anything in the static over all the thousands of miles they've traveled. Sometimes, when the day's long, and he feels trapped in this place, the walls closing in, inch by spore-covered inch, he imagines just one other person out there, doing the same thing, clicking on the dial one last time, and hearing his voice. And then he gets up and keeps fighting, because reinforcements are coming. They are.

"You know what that means, don't you?" Sam asks.

"That you like to hear yourself talk?"

Okay, so he left himself wide open for that. "No. It means we can save the world while we sleep." He pauses for dramatic effect, then adds. "So, come to bed."

"Why do I think coming to bed and sleeping are probably not the same thing?"

"Because you're a fucking genius." He's only half teasing. Dean comes to bed anyway.


	5. Chapter 5

**Part Four**

Sam can tell by the shallow breaths and poorly muffled coughs that Dean's awake before he opens his eyes in the morning. He's almost afraid to peek, but Dean's still there, impossible not to feel him with everything tangled and mashed together in just a few feet of space. And what's touching between them doesn't zing with any charge that says 'back the fuck off.' It's easy, quiet.

He's not sure how to play this, never really had his blinders completely off before now. Maybe part of him's been hoping that 'more' would end up being the two of them together in some kind of relationship that would pass for romance, you know, if they weren't brothers and mostly straight. But he hasn't really thought beyond that hope to what it actually is between them, what makes it okay to wake up in the same bed, to be touching and holding on when they're not dying or leaving, haven't anywhere to go. But it _is_okay.

Isn't it?

He props himself on one elbow, just like he would if Dean was across the room in another bed, because if they can't sleep together and wake up still themselves, then he figures, they're probably doing it wrong. Dean's got all the pillows, lies tipped-up slightly, his arms folded across his chest. Except for the lolling of his right foot at the end of the bed, Sam'd think he's brooding, closing himself off, but his size 10 stocking foot goes left and right like a skier in a giant slalom, and Dean's eyes follow it, save one quick glance and half-smile of greeting he spares Sam.

Thinking. Sam can live with that. Dean's been doing it a lot since there's no one else but them to do it, no one but Sam to say he's wrong, and those discussions go both ways. Sam flops back down on his back, grunts in feigned frustration, and snakes one of the pillows away from Dean. It _accidentally_whaps Dean in the face before it's properly crammed under Sam's neck, which doesn't seem to faze him a bit. That's good. A little disappointing, maybe, because a wrestling match in close quarters could turn interesting, but good. If Dean was looking for an excuse to blow up and storm off, that was as good of bait as anything, and he didn't bite.

Not that Sam's opposed to biting, but he's glad.

He clears his throat, like he's been preparing a monologue especially for the occasion of actually waking up in the same bed together, which of course, he hasn't, never let the hope run quite that far ahead of him. Sleeping together and waking up together are apparently, in Dean logic, two completely different hurdles, and Sam's the guy out front knocking them all down on his way to the finish line. Hey, he's never claimed falling in love with his brother was going to be pretty, but it doesn't have to be a train wreck.

"Look, I know we don't really do the talking thing, and that's fine, but just so you know, this silent, introspective thing you're working here?" Sam curls one arm behind his head, slides the other under the sheet, lazy scratch over his treasure trail. "It's really fucking hot."

Dean quirks one eyebrow, still watching his toes but with a more sideways tilt to his head like it's harder to stay focused. "I know."

This time, when the pillow hits Dean in the face, Sam doesn't pretend it's an accident. The wrestling match that follows is a little more than interesting, turns into a mishmash of really good friction and really awkward angles, but they finish pretty much together, and that's kinda the point.

When Dean comes with a gasp over Sam's stomach, his eyes are _half_ open and _hungry_, just enough light to make it clear he wants Sam the way Sam wants him, and that's all the talk they need. For now.

XXX

Things can't keep going the way they are. It's too easy. Well, the parts of it that don't involve nebulizers and flame throwers are pretty easy, even the part that involves two grown men sandwiched into a full sized bed. Getting them both in the bed starts to become way simpler than getting them out. Sam doesn't know what's happened to pin that twanging restlessness under the squelch bar. They're still in basically the same predicament they've been in all along, and yet something akin to mellow has settled in.

Before, there'd been a sense of dwindling-dwindling time, dwindling resources, dwindling hope. Now there's more. Call it the synergy of together or some other poetic BS. Sam calls it easy. Sam calls it better. Sam calls it more.

It's only fitting that the sky picks then to fall.

Sam's barely awake when Dean calls from the doorway. The only clue that it's actually morning is the aroma of coffee brewing in the office next door. (Dean always makes it there, since it's actually closer to the bed than the kitchenette on the other side of the apartment.)

"Sam! Come take a look at this."

"Nnnn." Sam throws a pillow over his head. If it was an emergency, Dean would just scream, wouldn't bother with complete sentences.

"Sam! Get your ass out here or I'm gonna... holy shit."

Well, that's not a complete sentence. Sam bolts upright, a finger snagging his shorts off the bedpost, before he heads for the door. He steps out so quickly, he nearly ends up covered in hot coffee.

Standing stock-still just the other side of the doorjamb, Dean doesn't even notice the little bit of hot joe that splashes onto his hand when Sam bumps into the cup. He's too busy staring out across the hangar. Following his line of sight, Sam has to squint and rub the sleep from his eyes to see anything out of the ordinary. When he does, he thinks he must be mistaken.

"Is that?"

"Looks like."

"Should we?"

"I dunno."

All this is just formality. They're already halfway down the stairs, couldn't stop their feet inching closer if they tried.

There's not much to see, but still, it's a little horrifying for Sam, who's spent days and days trying to improve the air quality in this place. Motes. No telling if they're harmless dust, or mold, or friggin' pixie dust, but they're there. They shouldn't be.

Sam can almost hear the memories shuffling in his head like hands sorting shoeboxes full of Polaroids. It's his analytical side, the one that says shadow demons can't cross into bright light that makes him not believe in what he's seeing, forces him to try to debunk it rather than accept. But he can't. Flashlight, torchlight, fire light, sunlight…the long and the short of it is, you can't see motes without light. And these motes? Right under the skylight.

"You don't think…?" They're close enough to the anomalous column of light in the center of the hangar to reach out and touch it, the way you'd reach out and put your fingers into a lighted fountain, but they don't. And Dean doesn't have to say what he thinks for Sam to come up with his own whackjob sci-fi scenarios about what's causing flecks of dust to sparkle like fireflies in a world with no sun. Not the most pleasant image is the one of alien worshipers on the top of the Empire State Building oohing and ahhing at the beauty of a massive alien death ray.

"Uh…no, I don't think…" It actually hurts to say even that much with his neck stretched out as far as it can possibly go, eyes straining up past the ridge of his brow in an attempt to get a glimpse beyond the edge of the light without actually stepping in. Turns out neck muscles are kinda attached to jaw muscles. Hard to talk with your mouth pulled open.

And then the sky falls. Or at least, the skylight.

Sam barely registers the crash and the much, much bigger motes of, _holy shit_, falling glass shards, before Dean's on top of him, both of them pressed into the concrete floor. After a few seconds, the crash of showering glass is just the tinkle and crunch of tempered shards around them. Taking a quick mental tally of body parts, Sam realizes he's come out ahead. Two extra arms and legs and the six feet of Dean between them. Six heavy feet.

"Uh, Dean…"

Dean coughs like a cat with a hairball and slowly raises himself up on his elbows, one knee snugged up tight between Sam's thighs. He probably does have a hairball, considering his face is mashed against the side of Sam's and Sam needs a haircut even more than Dean. (The last time he pulled it into a ponytail, Dean threatened to take his knife to it. Sam's secretly going for a ninja braid.)

Dean coughs again, this time lifting his head along with the rest of him. The proximity makes it hard to focus, and Sam squints a little as Dean runs a hand over his head, loosing more cubes of glass onto the concrete.

"You okay, there, chicken little?"

"Who you calling little?" Sam doesn't really expect an answer, which is a good thing, because he'd miss it if it came. He's too busy, blinking, shaking his head and blinking again. Something's off just enough that he puts a hand to the back of his skull, half-expecting to find the tacky of blood, or worse, something squishy that Hannibal Lector might consider appetizing. His hair's dry, if not a little greasy. So, why's Dean…? "Dude, you're glowing."

Dean smirks. "What? It wasn't good for you, too?"

It takes a good amount of effort for Sam not to give Dean a good hard knee to the groin for that. Dean's just lucky he's already blocking that route of attack. Instead, Sam lurches to a sitting position, his hands gripping Dean's shoulders through his shirts. "I'm serious. You're like…aglow."

Dean smiles. No smirk, no snicker, no quirk or snigger. He smiles. "I know! Isn't it great?"

Confused, Sam brushes a hand over Dean's shoulder. The radiant outline that makes Dean look like he's been attacked by a rogue copy of Photoshop, comes away in his hand. He turns his palm to the sky, feels like he's holding a ball of light. Between his fingers, the light has a fine grit, almost powder-like in consistency, shifts into the ridges of his hand, his life-line as long and deep as the Grand Canyon in the shadow of his fingers. Turning his eyes, to Dean, he sees the smile hasn't slipped yet. "It's not…? I mean…your asthma…"

"Nope," Dean says. "Not mold, or dust, or pollen, and I don't think I've got any in my nose anyway."

"So what is it?"

Now the smile is a smirk, a cocky, self-assured look Sam hasn't realized he's missed until now. "It's paint."

"Paint?"

"Well, not just any paint." Dean shrugs. "Alien paint."

"Right." Sam rolls his eyes and then his whole head to the side, taking in the mess. "And that was, what? E.T.'s answering service?"

"No." Dean reaches out and finds the end of a wire in the glass, starts reeling it in. "Just my kite." He shrugs as the silver object slides out of the carnage and up to his thigh. "Must've caught a down draft."

"Ya think?" Sam lifts the kite up, examines it skeptically. "This was worth almost losing your hands over?"

"No." Snatching it out of Sam's hands, Dean pokes his finger through a space on the side where it looks like two pieces of material that had been fused together have now come apart. When he withdraws his finger, there's more of the glowing dust on it.

"What is it?"

Dean smears the dust between his fingers, light glinting in his eyes. "Remember when I said it was almost like the metal itself was a power source? I thought solar-powered. I mean, made sense. Galaxy's full of power stations, always a star in sight. No need to pull off the intergalactic super highway."

He tilts his head to the side with a quirk so obvious he doesn't need to say what he's thinking. Of course, he does anyway, "Except if they had one too many cups of space java. I can hear 'em now." He puts a hand on Sam's shoulder, shakes it for emphasis. "You should've thought of that before we got in the car. Now you'll just have to keep the hose kinked until we hit the next exit."

Sam's bladder gives an involuntary throb at the memory that invokes. Some kids were traumatized by family car trips once or twice a year. Winchesters have a rare form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that localizes somewhere behind their belly buttons. When Dean's thumb unfastens from his collarbone and strokes up along Sam's jaw, the twinge goes a little lower.

Dean catches himself and drops his hand away, shrugs a little. "Anyway, turns out, it wasn't the metal with the solar power capacity. It's this paint they put on the back of it, like the paint they use on mirrors to make 'em reflect. Thing is, the metal's almost indestructible, but the paint peels right off. That's why they kept the painted sides sandwiched together between two layers...and," Dean blushes and looks away, "And you're too busy staring at my mouth to hear a word I'm saying."

"Maybe," Sam admits. He can't help it. Dean's smiling, ecstatic, confident in a way Sam's only ever seen him feign before. It's distracting. Sam's more than capable of "getting" the gist of what Dean's saying, but hard physical science is kinda Dean's thing. Sam's more a social sciences guy. He's more than okay having to focus all his social genius on the one other member of society. Besides, it's not really Dean's mouth he's looking at. It's his eyes, because they might duck and blush, but they keep coming back. Coming back to Sam. And they're open. With light gleaming in them. "Is there a short version? _Dean Winchester New World Science For Dummies_?"

Dean meets his gaze, looks long and hard, and Sam lets him, hopes he likes what he sees. It goes on long enough Sam finds himself wanting to duck away, but he doesn't. When Dean speaks again, it's with the tail end of a breath he's lost somewhere in the moment.

"Basically, this stuff's all glowy because I finally got it above the cloud bank and into the sunlight. Which means," his throat convulses around something but doesn't push down the wash of pink spreading up his cheeks, "the sun's still up there. And with this, we can bring it down here."

Sam watches the blush creep up Dean's cheeks, the steady advance of humility over pride, niggling fear he'll be laughed at or dismissed. Sam has no intention of doing either. "Well okay, then," he says, already leaning in.

Dean doesn't close his eyes until they're too close to stay focused.

XXX

Dean's workshop has always been a mystery to Sam. It's not that Sam's incapable of understanding what goes on there, or even that he doesn't care. It's just, when Dean starts talking about it, the glint in his eyes is the only thing Sam can see, and the way he moves between models and notes, one bench to the next, every bit as fluid and efficient as he's ever been cleaning guns or knives makes Sam feel like the moon watching the Earth orbit the Sun.

So, when Sam shows up for lunch that day, and Dean's...motionless, just standing in the center of his workshop, Sam's knees wobble like he's just stepped off an escalator.

It takes him a second to realize Dean's not completely still. His hand starts to levitate up from his side, and there's a remote control of some sort in it. One press, and a single bare light bulb pops on over a blanket of stretched cotton batting Sam's come to understand is the model of cloud cover. At first that's all there is, but Dean raises his other hand, both at shoulder height like a conductor in front of an orchestra. His left hand moves, side-to-side, click press, click press, and tiny motors whirr to life across the room.

Lights flicker in succession until Sam picks out the mirrors Dean's fabricated from the spacecraft metal, turning on little pedestals he's got rigged with the robot fingers of some gizmo or other. It's a nifty trick, in itself, but doesn't really explain why Dean's so...still.

Dean's voice is small, hopeful but tentative, when he whispers, "Aziz, light..." and presses another button. The room is suddenly too bright to stand, and they recoil, arms thrown up over their eyes, Dean into Sam, who catches him under his arms and steadies them both.

"It works." Dean's breathless, something close to a hysterical laugh in the timbre of the words. "Sam! It works!"

"Yeah..." Sam tries hard not to be dismissive, knows there's a point he's missing, something Dean's probably made before.

"Hope you kept your shades," Dean laughs, his eyes as wide as they can be with the glare pinning them down.

"Sure, I...oh." And that's when Sam remembers.

That's not a light bulb. That's the sun. And suddenly, the future's so bright.

"Ya see, we just poke enough holes in the canopy, get slivers of light crossing paths, and it's like the clouds aren't even there."

"Dean..."

Sam's suddenly glad he thought to move Dean's bed into the lab. Doesn't take any hard science to figure out what it's there for. Just biology and some heavy breathing. Then it's, 'oh, what a soft bed you have,' and 'why are we still standing up.'

Dean releases first as his knees hit the bed and he falls backward. He doesn't leave, just makes sure Sam's still watching as he catches his balance, like he needs to see his own reflection in Sam's eyes to know it's real. He pulls Sam down between his knees and leans in again, rougher, teeth scraping over Sam's jaw while their fingers brace into his thigh. Sam hisses inward, fast and sharp, when Dean slides back behind his jaw, stubble pressing against the soft spot below his ear. He tilts his head, sways forward as Dean does the same, each panting breath a kiss down the side of his neck.

Sam starts to breathe a rapid counterpoint, anticipation rising out of his chest in little tugs. He sits up straighter, curves into an arch as Dean's hands slide up from his thighs, over Sam's hip bones, barely there until thumbs hook under his last rib on each side. A shared gasp draws them together, Sam's chest hitching faster, and Dean's drawing longer and deeper.

There's still a faint whistling, broken descant, the recurring theme they can't forget, and that's as far as it goes. Dean stops, his adrenaline/exertion damp forehead pressed against Sam's collar bone, thumbs stroking over the quivering obliques at Sam's waist. His touch is conflicted, thumbs gentle and reverent while the rest of his fingers press hard enough to bruise, curled into a claw at Sam's back.

Sam reaches for Dean's belt loops, the way he did on the climb out of Hell, when neither could sleep without being anchored to the other. No push or pull, just feeling for the spin that will finally align them, tiny brace against the vertigo,

"Shit, Sam." It's just a puff against Sam's t-shirt, no inflection of guilt, though it feels like a confession.

Sam lifts his head, turns so the soft underside of his jaw nestles over Dean's crown. "You really need a haircut," he says.

"Do not." A hint of tired laughter.

"I mean it. I'll never be able to sleep with this mess tickling my nose."

Dean sighs, the last trapped, spent air that's been holding out the fresh. It's warm through Sam's shirt, soft in the valley over his sternum, and it can stay there forever as far as he's concerned. He shifts up onto the cot, and Dean doesn't pull away. They find a way to tangle their feet together so ankle bones interlock instead of knocking painfully. The rest of them follows soon after.

Sam's almost asleep, when it's over, still absently twitching his nose against strands of flyaway hair, when Dean says, "You sneeze on me, and I'm going to shave your ass and put the clippings in your pillowcase."

"Don't need a pillow. Got you, Shaggy."

"You're so getting Scooby Snacks for breakfast."

Dean's asleep before Sam can answer.

XXX

As is often the case with science, the theory is sound, but the practical application of Dean's master plan proves elusive.

Dean tosses a piece of broken asphalt off the side of the building. It disappears beyond the horizon of their knees dangling over the edge while they lie back and look at the sky-treacherous black sky, with a tiny dot of light in it that barely constitutes a pinhole. If it's the light at the end of the tunnel, it's a hella long tunnel.

"Sometimes, Forrest, there just aren't enough kites," Dean grumbles, tipping his head up just enough to take a hit off his beer and swallow before falling back again. "And that's all I've got to say about that."

"Well, there is _one_thing we haven't tried." It's been tickling the little part of his brain he usually ignores as illogical and a little crazy ever since they got here. He usually doesn't go there, but he can't dismiss it entirely, either, after all, it's where he keeps his daeva flares. Necessity and inspiration generally go hand in hand. He just knows Dean'll never go for it.

"What's that?"

"Well, if I'm reading this right, our problem is not being able to get high enough and still deliver a large enough payload to have an effect."

"Pretty much. Yeah."

"Has it escaped your attention that we've got a hangar full of top of the line aviation at our disposal?"

Dean's silent for a few seconds, long enough for Sam to know he actually considers the idea. That's saying a lot about how desperate he is to make this work, given his fear of flying. Then, he laughs dismissively. "We're not pilots, Sam."

Raising himself up enough to lean on one elbow and meet Dean face-to-face, Sam counters, "That didn't stop the Wright brothers."

"I can't fly. You know that."

"I will."

"No. You'll crash."

"Dean, I already know how to start up just about every plane in the hangar, have moved some of them more than once in order to get some air moving in here, and I've done a little reading. Most of these things practically fly themselves. It's just taking off and landing that's hard."

"Exactly." Dean isn't meeting his gaze now, a sure sign he'll cave if Sam can turn on the puppy eyes. "That's where we get the term crash_landing_. You'll crash."

Sam's kinda got the upper hand, leaning over Dean the way he is, and reaches across to grasp Dean's chin, turning his head enough to meet Sam's eyes. "I don't see where we have a lot of other options," he says. "And I want to try."

This time Dean looks him right in the eye when he says, "You'll crash."

And Sam looks right back with enough puppy droop to his lids to sell compost to a manure salesman. "I won't crash."

XXX

Technically, he doesn't crash. He does all right for the most part, right up until the day he actually has a job to do, and even then, the job goes without a hitch. Above the clouds, drop the payload, and out. But on the way back, he gets distracted and misses the landing strip. By the time his head stops pounding the glass and the plane stops skip-hopping across the hardpan, he can't remember what the distraction even was.

It's not a crash. Technically. Which is exactly what he's going to tell Dean... as soon as his eyes quit trying to go shut on him. As it is, he barely manages to key his radio before the world goes dark.

XXX

"Saaaamm!"

He lifts his pounding head, his eyelids lagging behind, and has the radio to his mouth when he realizes his hand's stiff around it like it's been keyed for hours already. And yet...

"Saaaammm!"

For a second, he stares at the radio, wonders how he can hear Dean with his finger still on the button. Or one of the three buttons he sees on one of the three radios in one of his three right hands. That's strange in an impossible sort of way, but even impossible isn't unbelievable anymore.

"Saaaaammm!" This time, the shout's followed by a hollow thump, thump, and he looks toward the sound, flinching like it's a sledge hammer raised in attack. It takes him a good few seconds of staring directly into Dean eyes through the canopy to realize he's staring directly into Dean's eyes through the canopy. Just Dean's eyes. He's thrown off by the thick cloth pressed over Dean's mouth and nose. He must be using it to keep out the smoke from the fire.

Fire. Smoke.

"Dean!" Suddenly his head's clear except for the little pink tinge to his vision that must be blood from somewhere. Unfortunately, a clear head does not equate to nimble fingers, and by the time he undoes his harness and flight helmet, bats the taunting oxygen mask away as it dangles in front of his throbbing head, Dean's nowhere in sight.

"Dean!"

He opens the canopy and vaults to the ground in one smooth movement that ends anything but smoothly, an electric jolt through his ankles and up the express highway of long bones to his brain. For a second, the world implodes behind his eyes, black and suffocating, and he sways on his feet. He's sure he's about to pass out right until the second he sees what he's looking for.

Dean's leaning against the back of the plane, a fire extinguisher dangling limply in his hand, and the rag still pressed over his mouth. His eyes are open, but glazed, fixed on the fire crackling not thirty feet in front of him. It's not the plane, thank God, but one of the engines has ignited a large mesquite bush, and the wind's huffing the flames in long, hot streams of sparks toward the tail end.

And Dean, ever the vigilant big brother, has placed himself between the fire and Sam. Maybe Sam should be grateful, but all he can think at the moment is how stupid that is. If Dean didn't choose that very second to start a slow slide down the fuselage, Sam would be hard pressed not to kick his self-sacrificing ass.

But Dean falls, slow like syrup down a melting sundae, and Sam catches him just before he loses consciousness completely, his hand falling away from his face, the rag and the inhaler cartridge inside dropping to the dust. The empty inhaler cartridge.

No.

Hell no.

This is not going to happen. Sam knows it isn't. Why? Because tragedy has a purpose. Heroes die because the world is so stagnant that only death affects people out of their complacency. It's the pessimist's ending, and Sam, being the only person left to affect, has never been more optimistic.

So, this? This thing he can't even say? It isn't happening.

Grunting with exertion, he hauls Dean to his feet and back around the other side of the plane. The smoke follows, wind picking up abruptly as it streams along the line of the fuselage, and he gasps and chokes, deep strangling spasms, that much more worried that Dean's silent beside him. He doesn't pause to ask Dean's permission before hoisting him into the cockpit.

He thinks maybe Dean lurches feebly toward the exit as Sam jumps in beside him, possibly worried about the Impala abandoned in the desert or just about getting out of the plane. He doesn't entertain the notion, whatever it is, just presses the oxygen mask over Dean's blue-tinged lips and straps him in. Dean's eyes are barely-open slits boring into the side of his head as he tries again and again to get the engines to fire. Sam can almost hear the 'I can't believe I ever let you do this' of accusation in the glare. The attention only makes him tighten his own focus, his jaw firm with intent, until his eyes fall on the fuel cut-off.

The switch is supposed to trip in the event of a crash, cut off fuel to the engines and stop a fire from reaching the gas tanks. Despite his assertion that he absolutely did not crash, Sam flips the switch and tries the ignition again. The engines whine to life.

Dean might be half unconscious, but he stiffens when the plane vibrates beneath them, his fingers clawing into Sam's thigh. Actually, that hurts, and it takes some effort for Sam to resist batting them away. It's no time to panic. Dean'll have to suck it up.

"Dude, I'm right here. I'm not gonna let anything happen to you." Right here being practically sitting in Dean's lap. It's a one-man plane, with a one-man cockpit, but Sam doesn't mind, considering they've been sharing a one-man bed for weeks. Dean's eyes grow wider, still glassy and bright. He doesn't settle as quickly as Sam would like, flails about until Sam has to pin him to the seat with his weight. One hand snakes free and smacks him on the forehead, waves front of Sam's face, bloody and trembling.

Sam gets it.

"I did not crash," he says. "And stop worrying, I'm not even going to take off. We'll just taxi back into the hangar."

Dean seems to accept that and relaxes, slowly, though without gaining any of his color. His eyes falling shut, head lolling against the glass, the oxygen mask fogging up just enough to keep Sam focused.

Of course, Sam doesn't see any point in taking it slow. There's nothing but open desert between here and there, and this is a medical emergency, so he guns it to near take-off speed.

It shouldn't be possible to not-crash without ever taking off in the first place. Still, he nearly does.

They're almost upon her, a shadow in the swirling sand, taller and more solid than it should be with no light to silhouette against. Then, he remembers what it was that distracted him into not-crashing in the first place. She looms before him, the proverbial black dog, only draped in blue, hunched and staggering slightly like she's been walking for miles.

A woman. Or a ghost.

He doesn't have time to decide. "Hang on!" He yells, and pulls back the stick, flipping switches he's memorized during hours of mock flights in the darkened hangar. He doesn't have time to wonder why Dean doesn't hang on. The engines scream, then cough, then scream higher and louder. His stomach hits his tailbone at the precise moment his heart decides to choke him, and he probably imagines the whites of her eyes widening at the moment the plane lifts off.

He's never seen a ghost do that.

XXX

It's the shortest flight in history, he's sure. He circles the hangar once to line up with the runway, and uses the altitude to scan the desert, but who or whatever he thought he saw is gone, swallowed in smoke or hidden in the brush.

Or maybe she was never there. He did hit his head pretty hard…_after_he saw her the first time.

By the time they touch down/ don't crash, back at the hangar, he's in Dean's lap. There's a damp spot on each side of his rib cage, hot from being pinched for so long, and cold, because the hands have fallen away.

It's been a good twenty years since Sam's been small enough to sit in Dean's lap. Dean should be complaining. He isn't. He should at least squirm and push Sam away. He doesn't.

"Dean?"

There's a red light on the control panel he's trained himself to ignore, another priority higher on his personal scale that took precedence at the time. He can't ignore it now. Irony's a bigger bitch than Mother Nature. He has to squint before it comes into focus, and then he hits his head for the second time that day, as he lurches forward. "Dean!"

The oxygen tank is empty. So says the computer attached to the valve where the oxygen tank would be...if Sam hadn't removed it for easier access in an emergency. Air emergency hadn't even crossed his mind.

His hand fumbles in the seatbelt mechanism, his other popping the canopy, and he twists around.

Dean's silent and still, a pale sheen painted over a mask of deepening blue in gradually spreading pools beneath his eyes.

For the second time in too-few months, Sam feels for a pulse. Dean's head falls to the side away from the gentle press of Sam's fingers. That's the only thing moving beneath Sam's fingers.

Everything blurs together after that, shaking Dean, probably too hard, the lurch that pulls Dean over his shoulder, long jump to the concrete floor. He drops Dean to the ground, and there's running, cursing, puffing, chest pounding, and waiting. His heart races, giant drops of sweat slip from his nose and chin, plunk hollowly onto Dean's cooling forehead, and when his arms give out, he collapses over Dean's ribcage, nothing rising from it but the acrid stench of smoke.

This isn't the way it's supposed to end. And yet, it does.

XXX

_In. Out. Up. Down. Days and days of not knowing which. Sweat with the tang of blood and creosote crusted over parched lips._

_They have no choice but to drink the water seeping through the cracks in the hardpan beneath their fingers. No idea where it comes from or what's washed in with it, but positive they'll die of thirst if they don't drink something. So, they drink. Sometimes while clinging precariously to the rock face, tongues scraping bloody from teasing the stubborn drops out of cracks they can't see in the dark. Sometimes Sam finds a nook and gets a hand free, so Dean can sip from his palm, every muscle trembling with exhaustion. Sometimes, it's the other way around. Sometimes they drink huddled together on crumbling ledges they're not sure will hold them, each with one hand wedged into a crevice, and the other in his brother's belt, cheeks pressed against the wall and mouths open like helpless nestlings. If the ledge falls, they'll go together, maybe one arm short, or they'll stay together, anchored by one or the other's bloody fingers._

_That kind of devotion, determination, and grit doesn't rationalize, doesn't compartmentalize where it's appropriate. It starts in their chests, moves up into their throats and down into their guts, lower into soft places that harden and slick with life and need. And they're pressed together in spaces barely big enough for one, just the ache and each other. Alive._

XXX

There's no moisture left in him anywhere, just this sucking vacuum it fell into and the raw, cutting ache of empty. He doesn't know how long he's been like this, how long they've been like this with he the only one still suffering, but his long fingers feel arthritic, locked through Dean's belt loops. He thinks maybe he can drown himself, die like Dean, choking under infinite sky, if he just refuses to get up, keeps his nose buried in Dean's still chest.

Until recently, he hadn't been this close to Dean in years, but there was a time he spent all the long, empty nights in crappy motel rooms, with Dean's arm over his shoulder, and his face pressed against Dean's chest, the television blaring some movie so they couldn't hear the ladies turning tricks in the next room. Funny, how Dean smells the same now, a little smoky, a little salty, and safe. Like death doesn't count for anything.

For some reason, a logic that only works on people insane with grief and children too innocent to ever lose clarity, he remembers one movie in particular. Not the name, but the movie. A boy with a computer brain. He drowned at the end, maybe half a mile from freedom. Only his best friend believed he was still alive, said a computer doesn't die, so the boy wasn't dead, either. Couldn't be. The friend had been right, in that movie, all those years ago.

But for all Dean's been to Sam, larger than life and brighter than the sun, he's never been immortal.

Except for the part where they totally climbed out of Hell. And the part where he woke up on that motel room floor in East Texas, even though Sam's sure none of the medicine made it to his lungs. Except for the part where he made the sun shine. Except for the part where he's Dean, and Sam's still here, clinging to the ledge, and hasn't let go. And won't.

Maybe that's the precise moment when the dusting of alien paint catches the sun rising behind the clouds and pierces the darkness. Maybe it's the sun creeping up behind them through the hangar's open door. But something works its way through Sam with a slow, curling warmth, through his toes, up the backs of his legs, settling in his chest, and then, out the ends of his fingers.

Everything whites out behind his eyes, and when it fades, he's tired, so tired, he doesn't feel Dean's fingers reach for his belt loops, just drops his head where the tears have all gone dry.

XXX

"Excuse me…"

Sam twitches but doesn't lift his head. The Impala's rumbling in the background, and that's the thickest damper on the face of the earth, makes everything blur and drift away.

"Excuse me…"

"Dean, just get coffee and hash browns at the drive-thru. I'm gonna catch a few more winks." Dean's stomach has been Sam's alarm clock for years. Sam's always takes a little longer to rise and shine.

The engine cuts out, and the door slams, thud-thud-thud up behind him, footsteps too light to be Dean. Sam's eyes fly open as soon as she touches the leg of his jeans.

He rolls over, immediately throwing his hand up over his face, because, holy shit, it's bright, and he can't see a damned thing more than a silhouette, a soft shimmering shape, long curls and a flowing robe.

"I'm Grace," she says, or the voice comes from her direction. He still can't see her face. "I'm looking for Sam."

She steps closer, holding out her hand, and he can see it's not a robe she wears, more like an old sheet tied around her like something from the Middle East, desert wear, he thinks. And he remembers where he's seen her before.

"I'm Sam."

She seems uncertain, wary, looks away as she says, "I'm sorry."

He swallows. "Don't be. My brother…"

"Is getting one helluva backache from lying on cold cement. Geez, Sam, this was really the best you could do?" Dean slides to a sit beside him, his knees popping and stiff. "Well, would you look at that. It worked."

Sam turns slowly, the world swimming in an ocean he thought had dried up, and his eyelashes barely holding back the flood. His throat convulses, something between laughing, sobbing, and throwing up everything he's ever eaten, a burn in his chest that hints at the latter. He has to blink once, just to be able to see, and when his does, a finger traces the wet trail down his cheek. Dean's finger. And those are Dean's eyes looking back at him, Dean's hair…glowing.

And in Dean's eyes, the sun rises over Sam's shoulder. The sun. Rises.

"D'ya see it, Sammy?" Dean beams. "It worked." He shields his eyes from the glare, but doesn't look away.

"Yeah," Sam chokes. "Yeah, it did."

"Um…" The woman steps closer, draws back the hood of her garment, reveals the face of someone young who's grown old in her soul, weathered beneath the surface. "I'm sorry if I'm interrupting something, but I've been trying to reach you for weeks, ever since I found your broadcast on the radio. And my car broke down about ten miles out. I thought we were going to die, but then I saw that burning bush, and this car parked not too far away. I figured it had to be a sign from God or something."

Sam can't help it, then. He laughs, like a mad man, in total relief, disbelief, and wonder, because the old adage is true. When it rains, it pours. Only now, it's raining sunlight, and the sky is golden. It's raining new.

She seems shocked, but continues. "I don't know if you meant what you said, but if you've got room for two more…"

"Two?" Dean asks, standing with the aid of a hand pressed into Sam's shoulder. A hand, he then offers to Sam.

She's already gone back to the car, is bent over the seat when Sam stops laughing and gets up himself, still squinting in the unfamiliar glare.

"Yeah," she says, turning, a bundle in her arms that she keeps pressed to her chest. "I'm Grace," she repeats, nodding toward Dean in introduction. Then she lowers the bundle. "And this is Schotzie."

A baby. A laughing baby with no teeth and sunlight in her blue eyes.

"That depends," Dean says, crossing his arms beneath a smug grin.

"On what?" She asks, her face falling. "I'll do anything for my daughter, anything."

Sam can only imagine what anythings she imagines, wants to elbow Dean in the ribs despite him being mostly dead all day.

"Do you cut hair?" Dean asks. "Because Sam keeps cutting my ear, and if he starts braiding that thing he's got on _his_head, I'm gonna name it."

And they laugh. All four of them, before Dean holds out his arm, and she ducks beneath it, already home.

All in all, Sam decides, it's a pretty good start to the day. Golden and new. Something tells him this time gold will stay.

**Four Years Later**

Four and a half years after dragging themselves out of the hole that used to be Hell and into the hole that used to be the world, Sam can say with fair certainty that what matters is not saving the world. What matters is what you do with it when no one else wants it.

For the most part, they've done pretty well. There are holes in the cloud cover in key locations all over the country, and banks of solar mirrors, waiting to catch and distribute the light. A lot of work has gone into it, the work of more hands than just Sam and Dean. Grace was just the first, and once they lit up the sky over Area 51, they came in a slow, but steady trickle. People. Friends. Family. People they never knew before the world ended, and will never not know again.

Not everything's perfect, though. Sam's work takes him to the sky, sometimes for weeks away from Dean, and when they're together, it's a secret. They're a secret. Or should be, some ancient paradigm keeping them tight-lipped and square shouldered in the company of people they think wouldn't understand, so they won't notice, won't guess what goes on when they slide their cots together in the dark.

Sam's not amused at the irony of having spent his life running from the dark only to end up clinging to the night and dragging it further into morning every day. He's not careful, steals a few extra minutes after dinner, a few more before breakfast, doesn't give Dean the chance to protest. He's purposely not careful. Tired of hiding.

It's bound to be one minute too many, eventually. And one day it is. Grace walks in to find Sam raking his teeth over Dean's collarbone, and his hand circled around both their cocks. Sam's just glad he can't see himself. Dean's expression is freaky enough for the both of them.

She doesn't even look away as Sam jumps to tuck himself behind Dean's thigh, jerks the sheet up off the floor. She just cocks one hip and holds out a jar of applesauce, blows a few strands of dishwater blonde hair aside, her ponytail holder having slid down to her neck so the short hairs hang loose.

"For what it's worth, I find the silent introspective types pretty hot myself, but if you guys are gonna be locked in here all day, one of you's gonna have to open this fucking jar for me, or you're gonna have to explain to my kid why she's going hungry."

Always the gentleman, or at least, always the caretaker, Dean clears his throat and holds out his hand. She puts the applesauce in it, and he reaches between his and Sam's chests to open it, hands it back without comment.

She takes it with a nod, walks stiffly over to the dresser, and picks up the radio. "And turn your radio off. Schotzie thought someone was dying."

Maybe it's his naturally inquisitive side, but Sam can't help but ask. "Um, does this...?" His hand motions back and forth between himself and Dean.

"...bother me?" She rolls her eyes and heads for the door. "Please," she says, back to them, "If you weren't doing each other, I'd have one hell of an inferiority complex since I've been here four years and neither of you's ever so much as grabbed my ass." She shrugs, grabbing the door knob on her way out. "Whatever trips your trigger, guys." She pauses before the door clicks shut. "Oh, and now that it's not a secret, you're washing your own nasty-assed sheets."

Sam raises his eyebrows as the latch slides into place and looks down at Dean who mirrors the expression. "Was it me, or did that sound like, 'hallelujah,' 'boutfuckingtime,' and 'getsomeforme,' only with way more words?"

"No, I think that about sums it up."

"Then why do I feel like I just got molested by a Jack Russell Terrier?"

Dean shrugs and pulls the sheet off his side of the cot, throws his feet over the edge.

"Nu-uh..." Sam snakes an arm around Dean's waist and pulls him back in, one hand on his chest, knee between his thighs. "You heard her. We're off the hook for breakfast, so you're mine for another hour...at LEAST." Despite the force of his words, he hesitates, watches the muscles jump in Dean's throat, across his chest, eyes dart toward the door and back, spinning, spinning, trying to find the sweet spot between stability and change. Sam has to remind himself it's the change Dean wars against, not Sam, but he ducks low, arches down so his teeth scrape up from navel to collarbone, slow, deliberate, and possessive. By the time his mouth opens over the soft muscle of Dean's neck, the uncertain quiver under Dean's skin is all shuddering desire.

He doesn't expect Dean to heave up beneath him, flip them around hard enough to knock the air from his lungs, doesn't plan the kiss that whites out his vision. Dean's fingers in his hair hold tight enough to hurt, but Sam's thrumming too much to care, groans into the hollow beneath Dean's jaw, fingers tightening to claws over Dean's ass.

They shouldn't be able to maintain that intensity as long as they do, but the victory isn't that Dean lets Sam take some of that restless energy, that Sam will wear bruises of too-much, too-hard, too-fast, too-long, for days. The trophy is the hollow in Dean's chest below his breastbone, where Sam puts his head and sleeps into the afternoon without a single mention of work.

They're late for dinner, too.

XXX

"You sure you're ready for this?" Sam asks. "I could just get Grace and Schotzie set up with the rest of the colonists, oversee the drop, and come back for you."

Dean's got his fingers hitched in his belt loops, the strap of his flight helmet around his wrist. He doesn't look up at Sam, and even though his head nods, he says, "No. I'm not ready. But I'm not going to miss this. It's the big day, right?"

"_Your_big day," Sam agrees. He steps into Dean's personal space, props his chin on the top of Dean's head, his arms around Dean's shoulders. "You know I've got you, right?"

"Yeah," Dean huffs. He's still tense, but Sam can tell he means it. Sam's logged far too many hours in the sky now for Dean to doubt his ability as a pilot. But fear isn't logical. Never has been.

"Well, there's plenty of tranquilizers in the infirmary. We could do a Mr. T cocktail for you, and you could sleep through the whole trip."

That does the trick. Dean straightens abruptly, jerks himself free of Sam's arms. "Oh, hell no. You think I'm gonna let myself be shown up by a woman and a four-year-old?"

Sam does a mock salute over Dean's head to Grace and Schotzie, already waiting in the chopper, Schotzie bouncing and bubbly with excitement. "Well, then, let's go." He slaps a palm on the back of Dean's neck and steers him toward the final stage of their save the world plan.

In Dean's defense, Metallica never sounded so good.

XXX

"Sam!" Dean wriggles, but to no avail. "Sam, so help me, G-... or... just... so help me, if you don't put me down, I'm not gonna give you that pony you wanted for your birthday." Laughter rumbling deep in his chest like forgotten furniture over an attic floor, Sam squeezes harder. His stubbly cheek scrapes under Dean's jaw as Sam lifts and swings him around. It's a bear hug, of course, no girly hugs allowed. That's the law according to Dean, which, in this day and age, is pretty much the only law other than the law according to Sam. Why they're the law, they still don't know. Somehow, they are the norm to which everyone else, as few as everyone is, looks for stability. Go figure.

It's a physical effort to stop laughing, stark in contrast to years of fake smiles and chuckles over throats raw from screaming. Sam has to bury his face in the back of Dean's neck to cut off the next chortle long enough to supply a comeback.

"The ponies are all dead, Dean. And the horses, the chickens, most frogs, possums, armadillos, raccoons, and...domestic cats. Hell, Moby Dick is probably floating belly up in San Francisco bay."

Dean grunts as Sam's elbows dig into his ribcage. "Well," he wriggles enough to get his arms loose and returns an elbow for an elbow, "no friggin' _Alpaca_for your birthday, then. You can spit in your own goddamned eye, and weave your wavy locks into scarves for the kiddies to wear in the winter."

"It's always summer."

"Yeah. Mother Nature. God, what a bitch."

Sam concedes just enough to set Dean back on his feet but keeps their heads pressed together, ear to ear, Sam's chin in the groove of Dean's shoulder. He can't stop looking at their shadow, locked together over ground that hasn't raised a seed to maturity in half a decade.

Their shadow.

Sam watches it float, long and solid against the gaunt earth, and something bubbles in his toes so he can't stand still. His belly heaves with excitement, the threadbare t-shirt rucked up between them so he can feel Dean's spine against his navel. His face is tired from squinting already. It figures that squinting and smiling use a lot of the same muscles. They'll all be sore tomorrow, but God, it hurts so good.

Still awed by the novelty of a shadow, Sam does what any self-respecting little brother would do. He makes rabbit ears over Dean's head, but Dean's too busy putting on his beat-up sunglasses to notice. Sam never understood why he kept them. There's not much left of anything they had on them when Hell spit them out. Even Dean's leather jacket is a vest, now, the zipper broken and threads dangling from the lining where the sleeves used to be. "It's the principle of the thing," Dean had said, tucking the glasses inside the hidden interior pocket. Sam's never bothered to ask what it's a principle of, exactly.

There's no religion here. No stone tablet, and no Ark, just the frayed edges of a torn veil, and principle. That and belief may be all they have, but today it's enough to make the sun rise.

Well, sorta.

Today, _Dean_makes the sun rise. And not just in one spot. Today, he lights up the world. He moves his right arm, and their shadows tilt left, split at the top like a science text illustration of cell fission-identically mirrored on each side and still singular at the point where their feet brush together on the ground.

His left arm raises above his head, and ...

Nothing.

His left arm raises out to the side, and...

Nada.

His left arm swirls around like a cowboy shaking loose his coils, and...

Dean rolls his eyes.

"Aziz! Light!"

The doubled shadow pulses for a second, like a lazer bounced off a massive subwoofer, and Sam grabs hold of Dean's belt loops as though the ground actually shifted. Before the vertigo leeches out through the bottoms of his feet, the shadow parts converge and lengthen. Dean raises both hands, sweeps them forward over his head, controlling invisible air traffic, the servomotors on banks of mirrors turning at the hands of men, and then stumbles back into Sam as the world opens up before them.

The valley, once called Denver, stretches out before them, gray and desolate. The Mile High City, substantially lower, Mecca for all the pale and forgotten still strong enough to reach for the sky. The crater in the middle where everything wicked disappeared along with everything good in the final days of the war and the world as they knew it, bubbles with ubiquitous green slime. Fresh water trickles out the walls of rock, the only source deep beneath the surface, and down into collecting pools.

After all these years of summer, and the constant roil of lightning overhead, the rock face stays hot, and half the water is steam before it makes the ground. Dean's sunlight bounces through the vapor, and Sam can tell from the blush on Dean's cheeks that he sees the spectrum just as clearly as everyone else.

Dean Winchester, proprietor of rainbows.

Sam's too lost in the green glow from the slime cistern to tease. Too busy thinking, "Wow, it really is green." It's been hard to tell with the world eternally wavering between grey-scale and sepia toned, devoid of true white light.

"Dean..." He knows there's too much reverence in his voice when Dean wriggles again, moves away enough for the t-shirt to slide back down. Sam compensates by sliding his hand around the front of Dean's stomach, stroking a thumb up under the hem. "Dean, it's the _Sun_. You made the sun shine."

"It's just smoke and mirrors, Sam. Nothing David Copperfield couldn't have rigged. You know, if he had the right _weather balloons_. "

"No." Maybe Sam shakes him a little. Or maybe he growls some. "You don't get to be all humble and play this down. That's the sun. You did that."

Dean relaxes into his grip. Well, he shrugs and tries to duck away, which has the same end result as sagging against Sam's chest. Sam uses the shift to rest his chin on Dean's head, closes his eyes to bask in a warmth not of steam or fire or smoldering embers.

"Reflected sunlight's not as good as direct. Not as warm. Not as much Vitamin D, only grows half as much...nnngh."

Sam squeezes tighter, digs down with his chin until Dean's jaw snaps shut. "'ts better than no sun at all. I don't know about you, but I'd rather watch a reflected sunset than another red lightning storm."

This time, Dean laughs. Sam had forgotten how good that sounded, how good it feels rumbling between them. "I know what you mean. I think I dreamt of Strawberry Shortcake the other night."

"The dessert?"

"No, the doll, but she tasted just like..."

Sam spins him around and closes their mouths over the words. When the sunglasses jab him in the forehead, he bites down on Dean's lip and holds him still while he pulls the glasses off with a thumb. He'd forgotten how green Dean's eyes are. The lip slips away in the startled gasp he makes when they lock gazes and he can't unlock them. They both inhale at the same time, and the effect is magnets spinning on a table until they align before crashing together.

Dean leans in at the same time as Sam, and Sam whimpers when all he can see is the sweep of eyelashes where Dean's eyes used to be. He arches back sharply, butts against Dean with his chest until there's enough space between them again to see between the lashes. He fans his hands over Dean's cheekbones, fingers back into the hairline, raggedly trimmed fronds tickling over his knuckles. His thumbs caress over Dean's cheekbones as Sam suspends the moment, mouths open and panting, until all the green is swallowed in black pupil. Then, turning Dean's head just so, he dives in after it.

The world could be falling down around them, and that wouldn't break the kiss. They know from experience. When they're like this, tangled, woven, and trying their damnedest be the one in body they already are in mind, there's just one thing that can stop them.

"Deannnnn."

And she usually does.

Dean pulls back until he hits the taut of Sam's hands, and Sam watches as the green pools seep back in around the black before Dean's eyes uncross, one after the other. They both look down at the tiny fists tugging in the hem of Dean's shirt, and sigh before Dean stoops and sweeps the towheaded cutie up, up, up to perch on his right shoulder.

Dean looks around, apparently searching in vain for something as he turns a tight circle around his own feet. She squeals with glee, then claps her hands over her mouth, tiny cheeks puffing out with the entrapped laughter.

"Sammy, did you hear that?"

"Hear what, Dean?" Sam asks, playing along.

"Could've sworn I heard a little bird. And I'm pretty sure it said my name."

"I don't know. What kind of bird do you think it was?"

Dean pauses his circling, one arm wrapped tightly around the little girl's legs so she doesn't slip. One finger curled thoughtfully over his chin, he says, "I think it was a Whina bird."

"What makes you say that?"

"From the way it said my name." He gestures toward his mouth to suggest he's about to demonstrate. "Deeannnn," he says, exaggerating the high pitch at the beginning and the long slide down. She giggles. Dean jerks, surprised. "Oh, there it was again. Deaaaannnn," he says. "C'mon Sammy, help me call him out. No one whines better than you."

"Dean!"

"No, not like that." Dean takes a whooping breath, and reaches up to peel her hand down away from her mouth, opens his mouth for what seems like long minutes before she pipes up and they call together, "Deeeeaaannn." They swoop together toward Sam, calling, "Deeeaaan, Deaaaannn, Deeeeeeaaaaaaannnn," until Sam reaches up and pulls her into his arms, tickling until she squeals.

"Aha! There it is, the infamous, ruby cheekedededed, flip-flop footed, curly-headed Whina bird," Dean teases once Sam stops his tickling and she pants to catch her breath.

"What's up, Schotzie?"

She huffs and puffs, always the drama queen, even at four. "The," huff, "the...light," puff, "It hurts my eyes."

"Well, then," Sam says with a knowing tilt to his head, "It's a good thing it's only reflected sunlight, and not direct."

"Huh?" Schotzie has a wolf-pig thing going on with her face as she tries to raise an eyebrow the way Dean does.

Dean reaches up on top of his head where Sam balanced his sunglasses, and pulls them down. "What Mr. Great Big Words here means is..." He carefully places the sunglasses over her eyes. "...that's a good problem to have."

The glasses slide down her nose so that she has to jut her chin out and tilt her head back to keep them on her face. It's cute, if more than a little heartbreaking.

Four years old. Schotzie's four years old, and today's her first sunset.

Sam looks across the valley, at their three shadows slanting over golden rock and under colored mist. It's nothing he ever planned. It's more.

How amazing grace can be.

The End

A/N: And that's the end. Back when this was first posted, I had pages and pages of author notes (which can still be found on Dreamwidth) in which I talked about the inspiration for the story (the song, "The Way," by the Outfield) and how an innocent idea turned into this huge metaphor or allegory or something way more than I ever intended. These are not those author notes.

Instead, this is where I explain why I've reposted this here after all these years and why I don't update any of the countless works in progress I've already posted. The truth is, I don't really watch the show anymore. Swan Song contained all my deal breakers, and I've mostly been following via recaps and spoilers since then. So, if you're waiting for updates on those works in progress, I can say with fair certainty, they're not ever going to happen, and I'm sorry. I just don't feel those characters anymore. Why post this one, then? Because it's my favorite thing I've ever written, and because I made the mistake of sending it to a zine publisher who now refuses to answer any of my emails. I have asked repeatedly that she stop selling the zines and take them off her site, but she doesn't reply. So, here. Have it for free. Don't pay money for it anywhere. I have a deleted scene that I'll post for you that's not even in the zine. The fact is, fanfiction authors have almost zero rights, and it breaks my heart that my favorite story is never going to really belong to me. Someone else thought of Sam and Dean first, and we can't all be Rob Thurman.

I was out running in the rain this afternoon, ten miles in the rain, wondering why I haven't been inspired to write anything new in such a long time, and realized that feeling like my best is already finished and is completely worthless is playing a large part in keeping me from writing anything new. I decided it's time to let this story go. Let it find (or regain) it's worth as a piece of fan fiction and give it to the fans for posterity.

This is me letting it go. I hope you enjoy it and treasure it as much as I have.

There is a deleted scene which most definitely would not fit in the "Teen" section of this site. If I get enough requests, I may put a link in my profile, otherwise it will remain deleted. I can also be persuaded to link the original author notes, but you'll probably be happier taking the story as you find it and not knowing what I was thinking when I wrote it. There is no wrong answer.

Much love,

Tracy


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